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Disorienting Democracy
Drawing on recent developments in continental political thought Disorienting

Democracy rethinks democracy to counter the increasing poverty, inequality
and insecurity that mark our contemporary era. In answer to concerns that
the contemporary left is not strong enough for these so-called times of crisis
this book argues that the left must urgently return to strongly redistributive
policies. But this alone is not enough. To bring lasting change it must strive to
untangle its long-standing emancipatory ideals from the dominatory tendencies
that undermine it.
This book proposes that the work of Jacques Rancière is crucial for this
task. Countering domination with a resolute assertion of the capacity of all,
he gives us a radical politics of emancipation that emerges through subjects
who refuse to know their place. In appropriating alternative ways of living
they disidentify with everyday consensus, rupturing and subverting our
unequal order to force alternatives onto the agenda. Juxtaposing Rancière
with other thinkers from Judith Butler to Jacques Derrida, Clare Woodford
draws out the practical implications of Rancière’s work for our current time.
She develops dissensual practices that provoke us not just to assert that
another world is possible, but to bring about that other world today.
Challenging what it means to do political philosophy, rethinking the role of
critical theory, ethics, education, literature and aesthetics for democracy, and
rejecting the longstanding divide between theory and activism, this book will
be of particular interest to graduates, scholars and activists.
Clare Woodford is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the School of

Humanities, University of Brighton, UK.
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Disorienting democracy 1

1 Equality: The twisted path of emancipation 29
2 Reflexivity: Untangling the revolution 61
3 Aversivity: Provoking the self 90
4 Poeticity: From the glade of cicadas to the island of the people 117
5 Absurdity: Aesthetics of subversion 150
Reflections on revolutionising: A voyage without a compass 176
Bibliography 182
Index 195
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to David Owen, Russell Bentley, Priya Khambhaita and
Aletta Norval for inspiring me to begin work on the ideas that led to this
project; and to Ray Kiely, Jeremy Jennings and Clive Gabay at Queen Mary,
University of London for encouraging me to write a book in the first place. I
also want to thank all my students on the POL375 Democracy in Action
module at Queen Mary, University of London in the Spring of 2014, who,
with their incredible energy and thirst for knowledge challenged my thinking
and encouraged me to keep writing. In addition, I am grateful to the many
people who read and commented on earlier drafts of sections of this book,
including Lasse Thomassen, Robbie Shilliam, Jean-François Drolet and
David Williams at Queen Mary, for their discussion of an earlier draft of
Chapter 3; Christoph Menke at the Goethe University, Frankfurt for an ani-
mated discussion that contributed to Chapter 2; Alistair Jones for comments
on Chapter 5; and all participants of the workshop on the draft manuscript in
April 2015 hosted by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics,
at the University of Brighton, in particular David Owen, Bob Brecher, Mark
Devenney, Anthony Leaker, Victoria Margree, Robin Dunford, Tim Huzar
and Lars Cornelissen for insightful comments on draft chapters; and to Andrew
Schaap at Exeter, for a detailed review of the full manuscript. Further appre-
ciation is owed to David Owen, Sam Chambers and Lisa Disch for taking
time to discuss many of these ideas on separate occasions as well as to David
for directing me towards ‘The Orange Alternative’; and I will ever be indebted to
Mark Devenney for his close reading, enthusiasm for argument and passio-
nate critique of many ideas herein, as well as his collegiality that provided me
with time to write it all up.
My sincere appreciation also to all of my colleagues in the Humanities
department at the University of Brighton for welcoming me to this truly
unique intellectual environment and unrivalled centre for interdisciplinary
critical thought in the UK. Further thanks to my family, for the inspiration,
the stories, the music and the endless questioning as well as putting up with
losing me to the book over the past couple of years. Finally, special thanks as
always to Neill for his wholehearted support, attention to detail, limitless
patience, and for always understanding.
Introduction
Disorienting democracy
Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics

itself, the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribu-
tion of bodies into functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency.
(Jacques Rancière1)
In a world marked by increasing poverty, insecurity and inequality, the work

of Jacques Rancière is of critical importance. His thought is centred around a
powerful conceptualisation of emancipation that is available to all. It does not
rely on access to specialist knowledge or resources. It functions simply via two
curious claims that polemically challenge what we thought we knew: first,
politics is not the complex art of governing (which inevitably will exclude in
some way or another) but rather is a moment that disrupts any ordered
society in the name of the equality of anybody. Second, democracy is not an
ordered, institutionalised system of government but is the emergence of ‘the
poor’ onto the scene as a force to be reckoned with.2 For Rancière, emanci-
pation happens through democracy, although as we can already see, a wholly
unfamiliar definition of democracy.
This emancipation is premised on the assumption that all are equal. The
force of this assumption arises from its two rather banal-sounding effects:
first, that there is no necessary, specific ‘aptitude’ that discerns what role or
job one is fit for in society; and second, that work can wait. These two effects
may seem uncontroversial but as will be argued below together they under-
mine the ‘knowing one’s place’ attitude that maintains any social order. They
comprise the key that unlocks the impossible. They enable people to fight
back against domination: to enact that which according to their social posi-
tion, they cannot; to enact how things can be different; to reveal as contingent
our current ways of being, saying and doing; and to demonstrate that other
distributions of jobs, social roles, behaviours, ways of life and distributions of
wealth and property are possible.
Despite the force of his thinking Rancière’s approach is unassuming. He
insists that he is not a theorist of anything; instead he intervenes polemically
in already existing discussions about politics, struggle and emancipation. His
works discuss and compare historical emancipatory struggles in order to
2 Introduction
make certain assertions about their common features. He does not claim to
invent new ideas, or to construct a grand theory of the world,3 nor does he
tell us what we should do or how we should act.4 Instead, he shifts our focus,
redirects our gaze and changes our perception of what is possible. Thus, the
impact of his thought is far-reaching. For those committed to equality and
emancipation it underlines the need to resist the apparent necessity of all
forms of suffering, poverty, division and inequality. He prompts us to attend

to the strategies that those who have nothing can use, not merely to ask, but
to force the world to take account of them.
Rancière begins by rethinking the roots of democracy. This is no innocent step,
for he acknowledges that to speak of democracy ‘means to speak of … struggle …
to draw the map of a battlefield’.5 His thinking lives up to this description,
disorienting familiar conceptions of what democracy is and how it works. Against
the conception of democracy as a system of government he asserts that it is the
momentary enactment of equality that takes place in the struggle between rich
and poor. Democracy is the moment when ‘the poor’ are constituted as a group-
ing that can no longer be ignored or dismissed. Not only does he thereby disorient
everything we thought we knew about democracy, but in turn his conception
of democracy itself disorients and challenges any particular social order.
Furthermore, Rancière’s thinking takes a trajectory that disorients the very
history of Western thought despite operating from within it. For centuries
established thought has justified and entrenched social order, hierarchy and
inequality. Rancière’s writing reflects the poststructuralist assertion that man-
kind constructs knowledge in response to the uncertainty that marks the
human condition. In giving authority to that knowledge we veil the traces of
its construction in ‘certainty’, ‘fact’ and ‘truth’. Despite Nietzsche’s famous
attack on philosophy’s presumed ability to represent truth, Rancière shows
that philosophy, understood as both a discipline and a practice of thinking,
continues to justify its place in the world today as the path to right knowl-
edge. In considering how human knowledge excludes and obstructs the
struggles of the poor to exist Rancière disorients us further by knocking
philosophy – established human thought – off its pedestal.
Yet we will always claim to know, if only because living involves thinking
as we move through time. At the simplest level we accrue thoughts over time and
refer to them as knowledge. Rancière’s project troubles this knowledge and
undermines our certainty. ‘From the very beginning’, he tells us, ‘my concern
has been with the study of thought and speech there where they produce
effects, that is, in a social battle … over what we perceive and how we can
name it’.6 This is a never-ending project. However much we may decry par-
ticular instantiations of knowledge, it is somehow in conjunction with think-
ing that we proceed through life. Our struggle against the dominatory effects
of knowledge can therefore only be temporary. We build new idols as we
destroy the old. Any disorientation that shocks us and stops us in our tracks
is momentary. It may well effect meaningful changes to our world but the
shock will fade and become normalised. Each particular change can never
Introduction 3
halt this general ‘will to know’ with its associated exclusionary effects. Time
will continue to pass. We will continue to live and reorient ourselves. We
make meaning of unmeaning. Due to the dominatory snares this entails any
commitment to democratic equality requires repeated disorientation.
Although Rancière’s work may appear as philosophy we can see that this is
clearly not in any ordinary sense. Littered with metaphors of journeys, voya-
ges and combat, his writing narrates for us a vision of ‘politics’ as an ongoing
battle. Theorising ‘politics’ as a strategy of anti-philosophy his thought shreds

the ‘Western tradition’ and insists that we rethink how knowledge, and the
instituted discipline of philosophy, justifies inequality. Surrounded by the
rubble of philosophy Rancière reads ‘politics’ as a moment of fighting back.
Rather than a scientific method or an art of governing Rancière views ‘poli-
tics’ as the struggle against the ordering and justification of any inequality,
better thought of as a strategy – a way of acting – against knowledge. This
‘politics’ breaks with domination and pits knowledge against knowledge. It
changes worlds and smashes chains. It is available to those who have nothing
and instantiates emancipation. For those opposed to poverty, insecurity and
inequality Rancière’s account seems like a good place to start.
Disorienting the left and the limits of communism

Yet surely all this talk of smashing chains and changing worlds is too melo-
dramatic. We already have ways to counter poverty, insecurity and inequality.
Over the last 250 years many on both the left and the right have come to
agree that democratic systems of government, albeit in varying forms, are the
best way to promote well-being and stability, wealth, fairer access to resour-
ces, and security. Consequently, it is necessary to ask about the extent to
which Rancière’s work can be of use or even relevant to us today.
First, it is interesting to note that despite this consensus it is strange that
during the past four decades democracies have been plagued by a language of
crisis. Since the late 1960s there has been significant concern about a crisis
that is internal to the workings of democracy itself7 as well as the more
recent threat to democracy emanating from the steady growth of the far
right.8 In the midst of these worries about the survival of democracy the
events of 9/11 sparked fears for Western security, which were also cast in
the language of ‘crisis’. Regular security alerts and talk of a new ‘axis of evil’
are used to justify the perception of an increased risk to citizen lives from
terrorist attacks and fundamentalist beliefs.9 These fears can be used to legit-
imate the intensification of securitisation and warfare across the globe driving
surveillance of citizen populations and other states in the name of the very
democracy these practices undermine. These two ‘crises’ were more recently
compounded by a third: the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing global
recession. Democracy is thereby currently figured as plagued by this three-
tiered crisis of government, physical security and access to the wealth and
resources needed for the reproduction of democratic life.
4 Introduction
Indeed, we see the evidence for these crises every day. First, many would
recognise the democratic malaise neatly observed by Donatella della Porta in
Can Democracy Be Saved? Democracy, she argues, is limited by diverse layers
of factors, including the decline in representation and accountability, falling
electoral turnout, and the dis-connect between citizens and politicians,10
compounded by a shift in power from political parties to executive decision
makers, from nation state to international bodies such as the European Union
(EU), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and from state
to market.11 Citizens seem cut off from state decision making or are unable to
influence the governance of their own lives.
Second, fears about terrorism are intensified as we attribute more suffering
to terrorist attacks, from 9/11 and the 2004 Madrid bombings, to the multiple
attacks in France and the massacre of foreign tourists on a Tunisian beach in
2015. The life-shattering effects for the survivors and those left behind to
grieve, are all too evident. Finally, the financial crash and recession impover-
ished many people around the world. Health care and other essential services
have been dramatically curtailed, and malnutrition, in particular among children
and the elderly, is on the increase.12 Each of these ‘crises’ has had tangible
negative effects on the lives of millions around the globe.
In response, many democratic protest movements have emerged to repudi-
ate the ‘no alternative’ narrative of parliamentary politics. These include
Occupy! in the USA and the UK, as well as the Stop the Cuts Trade Union
Movement in the UK; M-15 in Spain and the antaganesimoi in Greece; the
student protests in Italy, Bulgaria, Sweden, Germany and Holland; the pro-
tests against the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil; the Iranian Green revolu-
tion of 2010; the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011–12; the 2012 Gezi Park demonstrations
in Turkey; and the Hong Kong Occupy movement of 2013–14. In some
countries these protests have given rise to new left-wing political parties,
most notably Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. In many cases they
have managed to halt contentious actions and oppressive practices or even
overthrow regimes. It is not surprising that many identify this wave of
protests and rebellion as the rise of a new left, a global populist movement
that has emerged from the crisis to rethink democratic accountability, over-
come the divisions that have led to terrorism, fear and surveillance, and to
reject the austerity politics that continues to cause suffering and exacerbate
inequality.
Indeed, it is evident from the wave of publications that have appeared since
2008 that there is a growing sense of optimism and anticipation in con-
temporary academic literature. Some claim that ‘the time is now’,13 that ‘the
age of revolutions is by no means over’,14 that ‘something new is happen-
ing’,15 and ‘something big is possible’;16 we are witnessing the ‘rebirth of his-
tory’17 or at least ‘a return to full blown history’:18 ‘the dream is being
fulfilled’.19 Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek recently declared that ‘the long
night of the left is drawing to a close’20 and many have turned to consider
what this new left politics will comprise.
Introduction 5
In order to consider how we might further characterise the politics of this
emerging movement a conference on communism was held at Birkbeck Uni-
versity in London, in March 2009.21 Although all the speakers seemed to
agree that a return to the name communism could well be appropriate for this
rising movement,22 they disagreed significantly on what exactly this name
referred to. From their debates we get an overview of some of the main points
of contention that have always antagonised, animated and divided the left
more widely at protests, assemblies and occupations as well as in academic
debates.23 Drawing out the key points of contention is also useful for our
purposes here since Rancière was one of the speakers at this conference.
Examining his response to these issues helps us to bring into sharper focus the
unique approach that his thinking offers.
The debate brings together those committed to the common and the
struggle for liberation against oppression or domination from those who
support individualism. It allows them to unite around, in Badiou’s terminol-
ogy, a commitment to the ‘idea of communism’: a radical egalitarianism
which is translated into egalitarian social practices of democratic order.
Beyond this, however, it seems to split the left between two polarised posi-
tions: those who support the reformulation of an organised, theorised, vertical
and institutionalised communist party versus those who support an organic or
spontaneous emergence of activist-led, horizontalist, multitude of the people.
Although this is a rough sketch of the diversity of opinions represented, its
pertinence is supported by the ease with which we can use it to identify each
of the thinkers at the conference taking up a position between these poles.
With regard to spontaneity or organisation, people and parties, multitude or
institutions, Badiou asserts his commitment to the ‘idea’ which he argues
must be kept separate from any use of the adjective ‘communist’ in terms of
movements or parties,24 while Hardt and Negri posit that communism is
immanent within capitalism itself and relies upon the spontaneous emergence
of the multitude which does not require the organisational form of intellectual
critique or vanguardism.25 This is opposed by Žižek and Jodi Dean who
champion the need to theorise and organise.26 In a separate vein but echoing
the language of the debate, David Graeber emphasises his commitment to
communism not through parties but in the ideal of ‘from each according to
their abilities, to each according to their needs’,27 effected via local, organic,
grass-roots, direct and activist-led democracy.
We see here then a distinction between those who view this as a hor-
izontalist organic process, directed by protestors themselves in response to
local issues, and by those who demand a new global communist imaginary
articulated by a party with some form of vertical leadership to anchor the
struggle. Badiou insists that any notion of the ‘communist party’ is ‘mis-
conceived’28 and Rancière adds that we should not be talking about ‘organi-
sation or how to take over state power’.29 For Bosteels, by contrast, the party
is a flexible way of organising our commitment to this ‘idea of communism’,30
while Hallward does not explicitly refer to the need for a party but does talk
6 Introduction
of the need for discipline and standing together.31 This echoes Dean and
Žižek’s call for a communist party to provide discipline and preparation32 as
a way of organising the collective to enable unified planning and preparation.
Although they do contrast this with an authoritarian Leninist party they still
insist on the need for hierarchy and leadership.
I do not deny that these are important issues to discuss, but that by merely
taking up positions within this debate we allow it to mask two more impor-
tant issues. First, talk of the left’s revival too often ignores, merely accepts, or
sometimes even celebrates the cost of protest thereby overlooking the rela-
tionship between order and change. The recent wave of protests has been met
by a harsh and repressive response from the authorities. In many countries
occupiers have been evicted, protestors prosecuted and restrictive new laws
introduced. The austerity consensus continues, and the dissenting Greek
(Syriza), and emerging Spanish (Podemos) positions, are condemned. Strug-
gles beyond Europe and the USA, such as those in Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain,
Iran and of course Syria, were met with even greater physical violence, inse-
curity and aggression.33 Consequently, despite the democratic calls by these
movements we cannot ignore these instances of a troubling suppression of
democracy with grave material consequence for many of those involved.
This is not to claim that these protests have failed but that there are stra-
tegic questions about the effectiveness of protest tactics and who pays the
highest price. Žižek and Dean both raise concerns that these movements are
apolitical and risk descending into a short-lived carnival celebrating a tem-
porary opening of space free of police control, which is then suppressed
without lasting egalitarian consequences. In their view the way to avoid this is
to introduce discipline and leadership into the movement in the form of the
party.34 However, the impact of such protests cannot be easily quantified. The
ensuing debate between the organic and the party approach, verticalism
versus horizontalism, organisation versus spontaneity, and theorists versus
activists misses the point and restricts our understanding. Both the valorising
of the disorder of revolt at the expense of what may follow as well as the
romanticising of the disciplined communist party and its political programme
direct us to the same point: a new order. A disagreement about methods dis-
tracts us from the trickier question of how orders become more and less
restrictive, and to consider features of order that may make it more possible
for dissent to be articulated and responded to without the need for mass
unrest, violence and loss of life. If protests are to lead to change it is worth
attending to precise questions of strategy that foreground this question: to
think about not only how to make change possible but simultaneously why
and how change is resisted.
Indeed, we need to consider what it means to talk of better order. Many of
the aforementioned thinkers turn too soon to whichever method will help to
break with our current order, intimating that beyond it lies greater equality
and freedom. Yet they do not attend to how order in general functions – how
it is entrenched, becomes dominatory and results in further rebellion and
Introduction 7
protest. Hence I suggest that there is value in considering Rancière’s parti-
cular theorisation of the dominatory effects of order in general, the relation-
ship between emancipation (figured as a self-generated moment of equality)
and domination, as well as the conditions under which domination can be
reduced to make emancipation more readily available.
A second concern about the recent literature on the turn to communism is
that many of these thinkers replicate the language of crisis.35 As Judith Butler
and Athena Athanasiou note, the term ‘crisis’ provides a useful way to
manage populations. It enables authorities to normalise exceptional acts and
laws that were once deemed wholly unacceptable. Legislation violating human
rights and privacy laws, or exacerbating poverty, are rendered legitimate
during this time of permanent crisis. Resistance is characterised as disloyal,
unpatriotic and selfish.36 Crisis is invoked to quell dissent, control citizens,
and justify difficult conditions without resentment. This is not to deny that
‘crises’ have had significant negative effects. However, the wider order in
which we live is that which generates the crises in the first place. Poverty,
violence, insecurity, corruption and discrimination were present before the so-
called crises which have only exacerbated them, making them visible in their
extremes. Rancière sums up these concerns thus:
To characterise the phenomena of our times we must, first of all, call into
question the concept of crisis. One speaks of a crisis of society, a crisis of
democracy, and so on. It is a way of blaming the current situation on the
victims. Now, this situation is not the result of a sickness of civilisation
but of the violence with which the masters of the world direct their
offensive against the peoples … Those supposed calls for citizen respon-
sibility only have, in fact, one effect: to blame the citizens in order to
capture them more easily within the institutional game that only consists
of selecting, between members of the ruling class, those they would prefer
to allow to dispossess them of their power to act.37
Rather than responding to the short-term effects of the latest crisis, we must
consider why our social order generates vulnerability, poverty and inequality;
why some people are more vulnerable to crises; why it is that, despite the pro-
testations of then UK Prime Minister David Cameron, we are not ‘in this
together’ and why the poorest pay the highest price for systematically generated
crises, while the wealthy continue to gain.
This highlights the need to attend more carefully to (a) the precise ways in
which emancipation becomes entangled with and thereby subverted by dom-
ination such that we understand better why the costs of certain protests and
disputes impact more on some people than on others; and (b) how we might
respond to the injustice and suffering caused by the weaknesses of the repre-
sentative democratic system, war and terrorism, and financial instability,
without veiling the vulnerabilities of our everyday order using the language of
crisis to license domination.
8 Introduction
Rancière’s writing offers us an analysis which enables us to respond to these
issues. His work gives us a thematisation of strategy that theorises how to
effect politics in order to impact on the police order. It untangles emanci-
pation from domination and avoids the language of crisis. His intervention in
the debate on communism notes that reviving the term ‘communism’ is not
the best answer since it names the current Chinese regime which is ‘one of the
most prosperous capitalist powers today’.38 This is not to say that egalitarian
and democratic values are not intrinsic to the history of communism. Rather
it underlines the ambiguities of the communist tradition. He observes a ten-
sion between the logic of emancipation which asserts the equal capacity of
ordinary people to do things for themselves, and the logic of domination
which proclaims the incapacity and stupidity of ordinary people, deemed to
need others such as intellectuals or the party, to lead them. Rancière disentangles
the logic of emancipation from the logic of domination within the communist
tradition so as not to re-valorise communism while merely introducing
another form of domination.
Following this method through Rancière’s essay leaves us with a commun-
ism that is very similar to his (idiosyncratic) understanding of democracy.39
This is particularly contentious given that Dean and Žižek posit democracy
as a distraction from communism. Dean even suggests that democracy is
merely what the left has ended up with in the wake of the defeat of com-
munism.40 She deems democracy weak, unable to confront the inequalities
and injustices that arise from contemporary capitalism. Yet Rancière is not
defending the familiar liberal story that democratic and communist forms of
government grew from the same root in the French revolution, and that the
liberal/Marxist divide simply reflects a divide between those who prefer
representation, institutions and elections against the passion, violence and
extremes of communism. Rancière’s democracy is founded on neither of these
positions. It is the moment when the dominated assert equality with those
who rule over them, enacting it by taking what was previously denied, and
triggering the formation of a new order.
Dean’s concern about democracy is couched as a wider critique of the left
today. Responding to the disappearance of left-wing alternatives, she paints the
current situation as a crisis of the left, not just of democracy.41 For Dean, the
left has ‘quit’ and is ‘short on ideas – or [at least] … the ones we have seem
unpopular, outmoded’.42 Shaken by a severe lack of imagination and panick-
ing that we might be pushed into oblivion we have jumped ship all by our-
selves. This voluntary surrender sees the left adopt the position of ‘victim’ in
the political arena, so that ‘to speak at all they have to demonstrate how they
are weak, inadequate or suffering. They speak as those who are losers.’43 The
current left wants visibility but avoids the responsibilities of not only coming
up with alternatives but fighting to get them on the agenda and struggling to
implement them. Recent left-wing protests in the USA ‘whether as marches,
vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions aim at visibility, awareness, being
seen. They don’t aim at taking power.’44
Introduction 9
Furthermore, this crisis of the left is now a popular narrative which iden-
tifies the lack of an inclusive, more plural, ethically responsive and open
democracy as our main problem.45 For Dean, in embracing ‘democracy come
what may’, the left has castrated itself and entrusted its future to what causes
its own political stagnation.46 We should, she contends, loosen this attachment
to democracy ‘in order to find other options for a leftist political future.47 Accord-
ing to Dean, the problem is not lack of ‘democratization’ but ‘the left’s failure to
think beyond democracy’ and to explore and defend alternative visions of

equality and solidarity.48
Although I disagree with Dean’s demand to go beyond democracy her
analysis captures a continuing concern for the left: how to gain power in
order to enact a more egalitarian but less dominatory order. The difficulties
faced by the left are illustrated by the aforementioned struggles of Syriza in
Greece, Podemos in Spain and even Jeremy Corbyn’s battle over the leader-
ship of the Labour party. I agree with Dean that alternatives are needed if the
left first is to counter the risk that the extreme right gains popularity as the
only existing alternative to the current political status quo, and second, and
more constructively, is to consider ways in which it can continue to fight for
emancipation and equality. Yet at the same time, any democratic political
movement needs to avoid getting caught up in the ‘consensus system’ that
Rancière criticises so vehemently.
Rejecting postdemocracy and rethinking the state of the left

The term ‘consensus democracy’ emerges most clearly towards the end of
Rancière’s most famous work, Dis-agreement, in which he asserts that we are cur-
rently living in an age of postdemocracy49 whereby ‘politics’ has all but dis-
appeared50 and disputes that were previously deemed political, such as the
distribution of wealth and resources, inequality, exclusion and injustice are
suppressed before they can properly emerge. ‘Postdemocracy’ does not denote a
‘state of democracy’ that has once and for all surrendered to oligarchy but
rather indicates the ‘paradox’ by which the name of democracy is currently
being used to emphasise ‘the consensual practice of effacing the forms of
democratic action’.51 Such effacement is neatly demonstrated by the EU’s
indignant response to the 2015 election and subsequent negotiating position
of Greece’s Syriza, ensuring that the voice of the people was beaten into
submission in the name of Europe’s ‘democratic’ values.
In this consensus democracy, Rancière observes, we act as if we have reached
agreement on all political issues or accept that agreement cannot be reached,
acknowledging that the structure of world finance is too complex for common
people to question. The big ideological conflicts are said to be over. Without
irreconcilable differences that demand our attention democracy is reduced to
measuring public opinion. Democratic politics is no longer about fighting over
whether and how to overcome poverty, oppression or domination. Democratic
governments are now mere ‘business agents for international capital’.52
10 Introduction
This consensus system does not tolerate the existence of disagreement
within its order. It labels those who do dissent as not only different but fun-
damentally wrong. This suggests that consensus and terror are two sides of
the same coin. Since ‘politics’ has been stifled there is no method through
which this wrong can come to be understood or responded to: it is beyond
comprehension. This leads to what Rancière refers to as the ‘ethical absolu-
tisation’ of the wrong. For Rancière, the identification of an absolute evil that
cannot be mediated but must be annihilated is the logic that not only led to
the Holocaust but also to the events of 9/11; to the US-led ‘war on terror’ and
Guantánamo Bay; the torture documented in photographs from Abu Ghraib
and the media-savvy shock tactics favoured by Islamic State. Such a logic
clearly needs to be confronted if the ‘cycle of terror’ is to be tempered in any
way: ‘The folly of the times is the wish to use consensus to cure the diseases of
consensus.’53 Rancière’s analysis indicates a need to question the wider logic
of the very consensus that is not to be questioned. It is only by criticising
consensus that we can break out of the cycle.
Rancière rejects postdemocracy. He envisages his work as threading a way
through the straits of ambiguity, between the two ‘non-options’ of consensus
and absolute wrong.54 For those of us who share this view the question is how
to ‘reinvent politics.’55 Contra Dean,56 I contend that Rancière’s work defends
an alternative version of equality and solidarity, and that this allows us to
rethink a democratic ‘politics’ that promises a vibrant spectrum of alternative
paths. Dean worries that democracy ‘depends on and requires exclusion’.57
Rancière’s understanding of democracy is substantively different from this.
Democracy understood as a practice rather than a set of institutions chal-
lenges exclusion by forcing our attention onto how we may be able to lessen
its entrenchment to make it less damaging and easier to overcome.58
But how does this relate to left-wing movements today? Few, if any, con-
temporary poststructuralist thinkers perceive the new left as having anything
to do with the parliamentary state system. Instead, most take up either a
melancholic position;59 criticise left-wing apathy and victim status;60 or call
for a break with the left and extraction of emancipatory politics from ‘leftist
intellectualism and hermeneutics’.61 In contrast, as usual, Rancière’s position
here is more nuanced.
In her aforementioned critique of Rancière’s ‘politics’ Dean accused him of
advocating a ‘politics without politics’ which weakens the left, leaving it
unable to fight back against neoliberalism. It has been shown above that in
fact Rancière does not suggest that we need to respond to the problems of
democracy with more democracy in the sense that concerned Dean. Instead,
he claims that the problem of our so-called institutional democracies is that
they are not true to the democratic value of universal equality, and it is this
very fact that gives his ‘politics’ its ability to upset and overturn police con-
figurations and open up the possibility for something different. To what extent
though can this respond to Dean’s aforementioned concerns about the future
of the left? If, as Dean wants, the left needs to be more focused on ‘how to
Introduction 11
take power’ it is clear that we need to consider how best to exploit these
moments of rupture to build a new left-wing police. However, Rancière
famously cautions against any such desire. In response to Dean’s question of
how the left can take power, he says (talking about himself in the third person):
Taking over power … is not such a big problem: knowing how to impose
one’s will to other human beings is a science that any kid can learn in the
playground of his/her school. He knows a lot of left-wing or leftist col-
leagues who took over power. He knows a lot of left-wing parties that
had exerted or exert it … The question is not so much: what do they do with
the power they hold, as it is: to what extent is their power a political one?62
We could be forgiven for thinking at this point that he seeks to sound the
death knell of leftist party politics. His words indicate that any commitment
to equality and emancipation actually requires us to focus on the relationship
between power and ‘politics’ rather than a partisan struggle for power since it
is evident that if the left succeeds in taking state power it will merely build its
own police order that will go on to categorise, order, and thereby effect
domination. Yet to read the passage in this way sees Rancière obscuring
Dean’s concerns somewhat, and sets up yet another false dichotomy, this time
between Dean’s preference for a leftist party-based movement and Rancière’s
call to attend to the power of those who have no power. Dean’s motivation to
rethink the left is in response to the question of why the left had to abandon
many of the anti-neoliberal ideals that marked it out as leftist before it was
able to take power in the governments of Mitterrand, Blair, Clinton and then
Obama, and also exemplified in the concessions foisted on Greece’s Syriza.
Her inquiry seeks to consider why the parliamentary left has merely accepted
rather than challenged neoliberal economic and social policy. As will be
argued in Chapter 2, this is the result of the left’s failure to untangle its
commitment to emancipation from the logics of domination. We can thus
conclude that the traditional party structure is too closely dependent on the
logic of domination and as such contradicts and undermines its own ends. Yet if
we stop here, we can only assume that a democratic left should abandon party
politics to the liberals who embrace representative democracy and the con-
servative right which grows increasingly sceptical of any type of democracy at all.
This is not the case. It will be argued below that Rancière’s ‘politics’ can be
effective regardless of the configuration of police order. It enacts the impos-
sible – the power of those who have no power. Since it primarily depends on
the confidence of those who enact it, it cannot be prevented by structural
conditions, for it is apparent that whatever the structural conditions the onus
is on subjects to strategise in spite of these. Regardless of structural conditions
‘politics’ is just the result of subjectivation which arises from a certain confidence of
the subject to assert their own equality.63
Indeed, all of Rancière’s examples show ‘politics’ enacted in the face of
structural inequality. This indicates that we need to reverse the approach from
12 Introduction
a logic of incapacity (focusing on what is not possible) to a logic of capacity
(asserting the possible). Rancière’s casual comment that ‘[t]aking over
power … is not such a big problem’64 reminds us that more egalitarian social
policy need not be difficult and has been effected before. Indeed, a wealth of lit-
erature and precedent is already available to inspire and guide new redistributive
policy proposals. Policy change is not so difficult. What is required, however,
is a change in the underlying mentality that asserts that egalitarian reforms are
difficult or impossible in the current climate.65 Rancière inspires us to challenge
left pessimism of incapacity with a nonchalant but firm confidence of capacity.
Second, although it should not be confused with structural factors, how-
ever, such confidence will never be separate from structural factors, since these
may nurture and encourage or restrict and constrain subjectivation. Given
Rancière’s comments above about the politics of the state, we can identify a
political project here, in the consideration of how we might be able to create
and support such conditions. For example, factors such as lack of resources
and high levels of social conformity may make it more difficult to stage ‘pol-
itics’ in a way that can elicit a response. Hence, to strategise ‘politics’ is also
to strategise ‘police’: the consideration of conditions under which ‘politics’
may be more likely to emerge is also to consider those under which it is less
likely to do so; to consider how we might weaken the hold of any distribution
of ways of being, saying and doing that structure our lives, by both under-
mining their control but also their hold over us, to loosen our own attach-
ments to them. Not only is there still a project here, but this is a project that
can still be located on the left inasmuch as it is focused on emancipation,
democracy and equality.
Indeed, this is corroborated by Rancière in an interview in 2008 in which
he notes that state structures do constitute an area for political struggle. Yet
rather than position himself as for or against the state he once again takes a
more nuanced view. Contrary to those Marxist and anarchist positions that
judge anything to do with state structures to be bourgeois, illusory or unreal
in some way, he suggests that it would be short-sighted to overlook the effects
that state politics, infrastructure and organisational institutions have on peo-
ple’s lives, and the ‘possibilities and capacities’ that these can themselves offer
people ‘for new forms of action’.66 Rather than either support or condemn
the state he notes that the contemporary ‘democratic’ state is a ‘hybrid’ that
on the one hand comprises the democratic ‘capacity of the whole’ and ‘the
result of successive democratic struggles’, while on the other hand ‘the oli-
garchical machine’ subordinates these democratic forces to its own oligarchic logic
and privatises public space.67 This means that while it is ‘necessary to affirm a
politics independent of State logic’ it is simultaneously important to recognise
the terrain of the state as an area in which the cause of emancipation could
be furthered.68 The forms of democracy are ‘in no way oblivious to the exis-
tence of elected assemblies, institutional guarantees of freedom of speech and
expression, state control mechanisms. They see in these the conditions for
being exercised and in turn modify them.’69
Introduction 13
However, to corroborate the position of ambiguity emphasised above,
Rancière adds, ‘But they do not identify with them’.70 ‘Politics’ can be found
in struggles over state power, and state-based concerns such as rights and
institutions71 but this is merely one of many areas in which ‘politics’ operates.
This helps us to understand that a democratic struggle in the terrain of the state
would not aim to just ‘take power’ but to rethink and reformulate the repressive
relations of sovereign power – to ‘affirm the power accrued to the people on
all terrains’.72 We are thereby forced to realise that Rancière actually poses a
much greater challenge for the left; one that is missed if we merely focus on
‘taking power’. This challenge is to rethink the leftist project as committed
above all else to ‘politics’ understood as the enacting of as well as responding
to equality and emancipation. This is absolutely not to say that leftist move-
ments are wrong to focus on equalising access to resources, wealth redis-
tribution and alleviation of poverty using the state to achieve these ends.
However, this alone is not enough. Without this, policy change alone will be
short term and superficial. Unless the logic of domination is challenged more
deeply a redistributive order can simply reproduce the very logics of domination
it sought to overthrow. Rancière’s analysis equips us to focus on the longer term,
while his theorisation of ‘politics’ informs strategy for immediate action.
Since ‘politics’ cannot be guaranteed this requires an investigation into how
we might conceive of and construct police ordering that is more conducive to
‘politics’ and hence less prone to entangling ‘politics’ with police so tightly in
the first place. This may seem like an oxymoron but it is conceivable that a
less entrenched police order will be less likely to restrict or respond harshly to
irruptions of ‘politics’. The left will only be protected from domination inas-
much as it simultaneously encourages practices though which ‘politics’ can be
more easily effected, encouraging subjectivation by challenging social con-
formity with any particular order of ways of being, saying and doing. It is
therefore imperative that a movement for equality would need to struggle
both on the terrain of the state as well as beyond it and hence would need to
consider both the institutional forms of a ‘better’ police but never separately
from promoting practices more conducive to ‘politics’ to protect against its
own entrenchment in ways of being, saying and doing. Furthermore, recalling
the discussion of organisation versus spontaneity, this therefore implies that
leftist organisation in the form of a party, albeit a horizontalist party, cannot
be ruled out.
Plotting our route

The book contributes to this project by clarifying the role of strategy in ‘pol-
itics’ and then elaborating four practices that are more conducive to ‘politics’.
Chapter 1 argues that Rancière’s ‘politics’ is neither impossible to plan, nor
rare or weak, and instead offers possible, available and effective strategies to
effect social change. It identifies more precisely what Rancière’s ‘politics’
consists of and how it is related to the notion of ‘police’. By examining
14 Introduction
examples taken from several of his works over the last five decades I elucidate
three common features of ‘politics’: dis-identification which leads to the sub-
version of order via appropriation and subjectivation. Chapter 1 argues that
these practices could inform the strategies used in democratic struggle: to
consider how dis-identification might be enhanced by employing appropria-
tion and enabling subjectivation. However, it also illustrates the most pressing
concern that we find with Rancière’s ‘politics’ through reference to Rosa
Parks’ 1955 protest on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama. This concerns

how much subversion ‘politics’ can really achieve. It suggests that the extent
of subversion depends on strategy. The conceptualisation of struggle as ‘poli-
tics’ does not impose limits on what this struggle can achieve. Limits emerge
in the symbiotic relationship between subjects and their order and the ima-
ginaries that we construct. Hence, we can always negotiate and overcome
limits via creative strategy to reconfigure police order.
Given the absence of an elaboration of the relationship between ‘politics’
and the police order in Rancière’s own work, I suggest that it is helpful to
read him alongside four other thinkers, Christoph Menke, Stanley Cavell,
Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to identify practices which work
on the police in order to make ‘politics’ more likely. These are ‘dissensual
practices’ as mentioned by Rancière in the final essay of Dissensus. They are
not an ethos (a correct way of being linked to a location). They are praxis:
practices intended to bring about a particular end.73 In this case they are
understood to be ongoing practices (for there is no future time when they will
no longer be necessary) that we can effect if we wish to bring about more
democracy, understood not as a site or an order but as a moment of disrup-
tion, or a break with order. They are not valued for their content but for their
disruptive function.
Beginning with the dissensual practice of philosophy already mentioned but
not developed by Rancière, Chapter 2 seeks to consider in more detail what
such a practice would entail, drawing on the work of Menke, a contemporary
Frankfurt School critical theorist, to identify a central role for reflexivity. In
response to Rancière’s recent charge that critical theory is counter-revolutionary
and has been co-opted in service of domination rather than emancipation I
unpack what type of critical theoretical project might be compatible with
Rancière, drawing on Menke’s work which refigures critical theory as a
reflexive democratic practice devoted to identifying and undermining the logic
of domination. This refigures critical thinking not as an academic discipline
but as a democratic dissensual practice. It also requires a reconceptualisation
of revolution as an open-ended process rather than a singular one-off event.
Given Rancière’s insistence that ‘politics’ is that which disrupts any given
ways of being, saying and doing through a process of doubling, Chapters 3, 4
and 5 then turn to consider practices of disruption in these three domains,
while acknowledging that they will never be mutually exclusive and will
overlap everywhere. Chapter 3 reads Rancière alongside Cavell, the theorist of
the double self. It argues that we can extract the practice of doubling the self,
Introduction 15
aversivity, from Cavell’s moral perfectionism, in order to disrupt ways of
being. In order to do this we need to untangle aversivity as a practice from
the ethos of aversive thinking, and also clarify the role of democratic exemplarity
as one of provocation rather than imitation. This inheres a re-theorisation of
democratic community as much more fluid, impermanent and ever changing
rather than the more familiar assumption that it is bounded, identifiable and
fixed. This community is always riven with a spirit of critique in that we
demonstrate our care and commitment to it through our willingness to ques-

tion and wish to better it. This leads us to conclude that we consent to our
community only inasmuch as we dissent from it.
Chapter 4 reads Rancière alongside the theorist of language par excellence
Derrida, to bring into contrast Rancière’s emphasis on effecting ‘politics’ of
linguistic disruption through poeticity, a form of playing with language to
undermine its divisive and perjorative effects. Providing a genealogy of Ran-
cière’s writing in this field this chapter clarifies the use of his term ‘literarity’
and identifies stages in the development of this term to identify the way that
words break with and reconfigure meaning. The chapter concludes by draw-
ing out a practice of making and remaking the world through poeticity,
understood as play with linguistic meaning. I argue that it is of strategic
importance to reflect on the distinction between political slogans that seek to
educate and inform from those that use poeticity to effect dis-identification
and scramble meaning.
Finally, Chapter 5 juxtaposes Rancière’s work with that of Butler’s theory
of performativity to consider how we might subvert our ways of doing
through absurdity, to undermine norms of behaviour that restrain, restrict
and dominate. Since subjectivation functions by disrupting the sensible in a
way that cannot be located and given that a non-locatable disruption is found
in the absurd understood as nonsensical and unintelligible, I argue that we
can further maximise the ‘political’ impact of the absurd by extracting it from
its institutionalised setting in the arts. I then move on to theorise how
absurdity functions to undermine the sensible by drawing on Butler’s con-
ceptualisation of performativity as a way of undermining normativity. This
adds to Rancière’s work on subversion by theorising the role of iteration for
subjectivation.
This final practice of absurdity may appear frivolous yet the chapter con-
tends that it is deeply political, because absurdity is that which turns the order
of the sensible on its head, revealing the nonsense within the so-called sensible
ordering of bodies, places and words. Tracing the recent history of the absurd
I argue that it is not just an artistic genre but a political practice, greatly
needed if political struggle is to stay open to its own limits and shortcomings.
It provokes a constant questioning of our attachments that serves to under-
mine the workings of the police ordering. Although it may initially appear as
if I am trying to make light of the most serious of issues (hunger, poverty,
exclusion, oppression) I do not use absurdity as a comic motif but as a way of
detaching from the ‘correct-ness’ of any order: from the ‘sense’ in the sensible
16 Introduction
order. Hence, I am not focusing on the power of absurdity to make us laugh,
but its profundity. It enables us to see alternatives and to loosen our
unthinking commitment to what is considered proper.74
This book does not deny that the practices named here as reflexivity, aver-
sivity, poeticity and absurdity are better supported in some configurations of
order rather than others and it acknowledges that these practices are already
in operation all over the place. Yet they are not explicitly acknowledged as
dissensual in these terms. Its small contribution is therefore to identify and
theorise the relationship between these practices and democracy (not as an
order but as a disruption of order in the name of equality) to assist in their
strategic application.
Dis-reconnaissance in preparation for voyage

Before embarking on this journey of disorientation it will help to elucidate my
take on some key terms so that we can put them to use throughout the
following chapters. First, as already noted, Rancière employs a rather unusual
way of thinking about democracy and politics. He develops his usage of
both terms via a close reading of the classical texts in which Western political
thought first deals with the concept of democracy and how best to govern.
This reading has warranted little discussion in the secondary literature and so
is worth tracing it in detail. It is developed in the Preface and first two chap-
ters of Dis-agreement75 which Rancière begins with a passage from Aristotle’s
Politics. This tell us that the nature of the human animal is eminently poli-
tical because it is endowed with speech or in Ancient Greek ‘logos’. Speech
which differs from the mere ability to make sounds enables humans to express
their reason, to determine that which is ‘useful and harmful, just and unjust,
good and evil’.76 For Aristotle, humans are political because they possess this
logos. They have access to reason which delivers the knowledge we need to
make these definitive judgements about the correct way to live. It is this that
distinguishes humans from other animals.
However, Rancière is curious about how Aristotle moves so smoothly
between the two pairings: ‘useful and harmful’ and ‘just and unjust’. He notes
how strange it is that the first pairing ‘useful and harmful’ is presented as a
simple opposite, which is not the way we understand these terms today.
Rancière informs us that this was also the case in Ancient Greek when the
two words used, sumpheron and blaberon, were not understood as opposites.
Instead, blaberon denoted harm to the individual that could either derive
from natural causes or from the action of others corresponding with our legal
sense of ‘damage’. In contrast, sumpheron denoted a relationship to oneself:
‘the advantage that an individual or group hopes to gain from an action’.77
Rancière notes that blaberon was usually paired with ôphelimon which refer-
red to ‘the help one receives’78 and therefore again concerned relationships
with others rather than with the self. However, the unusual pairing of these
terms occurred before Aristotle’s work, in Plato’s The Republic in which the
Introduction 17
interlocutors discuss how best to establish an ideal political community. Since
they agree that any city is founded on justice, they begin by trying to define jus-
tice. Thrasymachus famously argues that justice is the advantage of the
superior and uses the two terms sumpheron and blaberon to claim that justice
is a matter of profit and loss. He argues that profit (sumpheron) for one will
always result in loss (blaberon) for another such that ‘the profit of the shep-
herd is the loss of the sheep, the advantage for the governors the disadvantage
of the governed, and so on’.79 In the discussion that follows Thrasymachus is
proved wrong, and the argument is made that, on the contrary, the profit of
one person is separated from the loss of another. In actual fact the beneficiary
of superiority is the inferior party who may benefit from the rule, leadership or
mastery of the superior party. Once justice has been introduced to the
community, no one suffers a loss.
Of particular interest is that the notion of wrong subtly vanishes in this
discussion. No wrongs are suffered once justice is introduced. Plato constructs
a picture of a harmonious city where the natural order of justice ensures an
apparently non-contentious, exchange of services between the city’s rulers and
the artisan workers who serve them. This enables the argument to be made
that if advantages are distributed properly by founding the city on justice then
a certain form of ‘wrong’ can disappear: that which occurs due to the actions
of another. Once the city is well founded it is no longer necessary to be con-
cerned about the parcelling out of uses, the weighting of profits and loss done
by one to another. Blame and fault are no longer relevant and thus unable to
cause disharmony. Once justice is instituted matters of guilt and fault-finding
become a thing of the past. There is no longer anyone to blame if some are
allocated a miserable or lowly position in life. That is their natural lot. Any
questioning of the distribution of parts is deemed an unjustified complaint,
and registered as pointless, disloyal whinging.
The reason for this is because matters of use, profit, loss and wrongs done
to one by another concern individuals as individuals, as separate units. When
thinking about establishing a political community Plato asserts that we must
focus on the whole. The individuals within the group comprise a larger single
unit that is the community and the focus shifts from that which belongs to
each individual to that which is held in common. The community is a single
unit that occupies a certain geographical space; in this example the space of
the city state with its particular resources at its disposal. As Socrates, Plato’s
main character, argues that justice in a political community is about not
taking more than your entitled share, the interlocutors’ discussion has to shift
from who has what as an individual to who has what of the communal shares.
Rancière refers to this as a shift from an arithmetical form of equality
(whereby profits and losses are balanced in commercial exchange or advan-
tage and harm measured in legal cases) to a geometrical equality whereby
shares are distributed in whichever way is seen to be most proportionate,
across the whole. This reflects a shift in the understanding of social order
away from understanding different social positions as grounded in the
18 Introduction
empirics of who has what, towards an understanding of order grounded in
norms; on the meanings given to ‘facts,’ the myths of aristocratic virtues or
superiority of blood lines that are built up around the possession of wealth,
and the correlate myth that there is a lack of breeding, manners and virtue
which are associated with a lack of wealth.
Bearing Plato’s work in mind we can return to the passage from Aristotle.
The aforementioned step from the useful and harmful to the just and unjust is
Aristotle communicating to us that justice is exercised over the sphere of the
useful and the harmful. Justice means that we move away from the simple count-
ing of who has what on an individual basis and instead come to realise that it
concerns each party taking their suitable share. However, Rancière suggests
that at this point it is not yet a political order. Instead, the political questions
emerge when we question what is meant by the notion of ‘suitable’: the prin-
ciples by which we distribute shares in the community. Aristotle identifies
three possible principles of distribution: wealth, virtue and freedom. If any
virtue is allowed to take precedence we end up with one of three possible
regimes: an oligarchy where the wealthy rule, an aristocracy where the
virtuous rule, or a democracy, where the people rule. However, Aristotle fears
that each of these regimes risks resentment from the other groups. He suggests
that the most stable solution is to combine the three. This is not as straight-
forward as it might sound, for although it is easier to measure and identify
wealth and virtue according to the criteria Aristotle sets out, it is not possible
to measure what the third principle (i.e. the freedom of the people) consists of.
This is a particularly important step for Rancière. He identifies the freedom
of the people as a ‘fundamental miscount’ since ‘the freedom of the demos is
not a determinable property but a pure invention’.80 This arose in Ancient
Athens as a by-product of the abolition of enslavement for debt in the early
sixth century. Although this was only one of the legislator Solon’s famous
reforms which are all commonly understood to have contributed to the
emergence of democracy in the ancient world Rancière suggests that it was in
actual fact this particular reform that enabled the freedom of the people to
emerge. It confirmed citizen equality in the sense that they could no longer
become the property of one another. They were seen to bear an equality shared
by all citizens with the disturbing outcome that ‘any old artisan or shopkeeper
whatsoever is counted in this party to the city that calls itself the people, as
taking part in community affairs as such’.81 The ‘unintended’ outcome of this
reform was that it enabled the freedom of the people to exist.
Rancière observes that in Aristotle’s discussion of the emergence of
democracy we find a particular relationship between equality and liberty.
Rancière acknowledges the dominant interpretation of the emergence of
democracy within the liberal tradition whereby the equality of the people is
deemed to be an ‘artificial equality’ invented rather than established accord-
ing to natural fact. Its presence then blocks and obstructs the ‘natural free-
dom of enterprise and exchange’.82 However, in the classical texts Rancière
identifies an alternative narrative whereby the freedom of the people operates
Introduction 19
as ‘an empty property’ that in emerging ‘set a limit on the calculations of
commercial equality and the effects of the simple law of owing and having’.83
The effect is to undermine the myth that only the nobles can govern by virtue
of their lineage, and instead reveals that all can govern. Lineage operates here
as a useful myth which masks the fact that the basis of the nobles’ rule is just
their ability to dominate through their monopolisation of the wealth and
property of the community.84 Freedom of the people simply unveils the nobles
as the rich, and demonstrates all notions of ‘nobility’ as a useful invention.

This miscount is not a miscount in the sense that the people’s freedom is
based on any concrete property. This freedom is not ‘proper’ to them at all for
they are not claiming freedom as a party distinct from the other parties. The
freedom they claim is not distinct or separate from the freedom that belongs
to others (those who possess property such as wealth or virtue). Instead they
simply claim to ‘be free like the rest’.85 This is central to Rancière’s sub-
sequent work. He notes that ‘it is this simple identity with those who are
otherwise superior to them in all things that gives them a specific qualification’.86
In this way the
demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all
citizens. In so doing the party that is not one identifies its improper
property with the exclusive principle of community and identifies its
name – the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position – with the
name of the community itself.87
Returning to the aforementioned passage from Aristotle, freedom blocks any

attempt to move from the regime of the useful, where profits and losses are
neatly parcelled out, to that of the just, where each party only takes its
appropriate share, for ‘the people appropriate the common quality as their
own’.88 Hence the freedom of the people brings contention to the political
community, for its members at one and the same time are denoted as having a
place, that of the poor, of those with no wealth and no virtue, but also as
being equal to all, and hence equal to those who do have wealth and virtue.
Thus Rancière refers to them as ‘the part of those who have no part’.89 The
emergence of this ‘part that is not a part’ thus reveals the miscount: the
‘fundamental dispute’ that concerns how to count the community’s parts. In
the moment of the emergence of the people’s freedom all parts disappear. The
very principles upon which they are based are suddenly revealed to be
inconsequential. Nevertheless, in order to maintain domination, there will
always be those who seek to suppress this miscount that disturbs order. They
will do this by filling in a particular identification for the demos, referring to
it by a specific name with additional identity criteria such as the majority, or
the assembly, or the poor, seeking to denote the demos as a particular party,
one group among others within the community. However, the ‘invention’ that
is the freedom of the people will always reveal the lie behind any attempts to
partition.
20 Introduction
From this follows three more points. First, despite Aristotle’s attempts to
identify three basic principles for the foundations of a community – wealth,
virtue and freedom – he later admits that the city has only two constituent
parts, the rich and the poor, for in almost all cases we find that it is the vir-
tuous who identify as the rich.90 Aristotle’s tripartite division veils a much
more simple division between rich and poor. Of course, we could claim that
this geometrical ordering of equality as a ‘fair’ distribution according to its
parts could just be philosophy’s way of veiling the fundamental ‘real’ of class
struggle. However, Rancière rejects this Marxist interpretation because
although he acknowledges that the struggle of rich and poor is ‘the whole
basis of politics’, this does not mean that it is a social reality or truth that
can be overcome once and for all. Instead it will always reoccur in the divi-
sion between those included in an order and those, whom for whatever
reason, are excluded, overlooked, dismissed or derided. Importantly, Rancière
asserts that any and all social orders (including communist ones) will be
established in an attempt to veil this distinction, to hide it and pretend that it
has either been dealt with once and for all, or that it never existed in the first
place. Instead, it is only when this struggle succeeds in breaking onto the
scene, rupturing the basis of any social order and revealing its fundamental
miscount that the division between rich and poor has any salience. It is this
moment that is ‘politics’ for Rancière:
Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the

institution of a part of those who have no part … It defines the
common … as divided, as based on a wrong that escapes the arithmetic
of exchange and reparation.91
This is rather different from how we might ordinarily think of politics. For
Rancière, ‘politics’ emerges to challenge any justification given for dividing the
common in any way (and any assertion that the ‘real’ of the social is anything in
particular). He argues that any social partition or division is contingent.
‘Politics’ thereby challenges any notion of natural order such as those found
not only in Plato and Aristotle but throughout the entire history of political
thought.
Moreover, Rancière claims that any distribution of the social is legitimated
by a justification. In order to accept any particular distribution or to go about
redistributing in the first place, one has to first accept the justification that
would motivate it. This means that it is not enough to understand politics in
the basic Marxist formula as struggle over material distribution (who has
what), rather that it is the struggle over how to justify what parties count in
that distribution. Hence Rancière’s thematisation of ‘politics’ indicates that
the struggle over the symbolic field happens through a material redistribution
but needs to be accepted within the symbolic in order to legitimate this
distribution:
Introduction 21
Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the
other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects
of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity.92
It is only because of ‘politics’ that we come to recognise ‘the poor’ as a salient

category that demands a response. This is not to reintroduce a dualism
between the symbolic and the material. Rancière treats these categories as
interrelated. The material is always symbolically loaded and vice versa.
However, there is a salient analytic distinction to be made here whereby the
material refers to the field in which justifications for alterations to the sym-
bolic are made. These alterations can only be recognised through the sub-
sequent change they effect in the material. Hence the relationship between
material and symbolic is symbiotic. It cannot be separated in practice, yet by
distinguishing them conceptually, we can better identify the steps that together
comprise ‘politics’.
The third point is that ‘politics’ splits in two Aristotle’s initial claim that
human beings are political because they possess speech or ‘logos’. It was
possession of this that he thought distinguished humans from all other ani-
mals for while any animal can express pleasure and suffering through making
noises, humans can express norms and reason – good and evil – through their
possession of speech. Aristotle assumed that fundamental definitions of good
and evil exist which humans learn through the exercise of reason. His under-
lying assumption is that reason is not only the ability to think and express
meaning through language, but the ability to do this in the correct way, to
express ‘right thought’ or ‘right reason’. Hence the claim that humans are
political animals can be used not only to group together humans as distinct
from animals, but also to group together some humans as distinct from
others, as those people who are not deemed to express ‘right reason’ can jus-
tifiably be excluded from the political community and rendered as animal in
some way. In identifying the logos as right reason, or right thinking, the
ancients could dismiss the mass of men of no consequence and with no edu-
cation. They could denote those who rule from those who are ruled, those
who give orders from those who merely carry them out.
The existence of ‘politics’ reveals a further miscount, for it shows that what
is deemed to be good or evil, or indeed any value judgement, is contingent
and based on argument. Any definitions of good and evil, just and unjust,
upon which a city or political community is founded will always be lacking in
one way or another. This is revealed in the moment of the emergence of the
freedom of the people. ‘Politics’ reveals that behind the logos that Aristotle
identifies is a further logos: ‘that which bestows the right to order’;93 that
which denotes what the logos is. The demos can emerge here because this
initial logos is undermined by a fundamental contradiction. For any order to
exist there must be communication between those who count and those who
do not, those who are political beings, who reason correctly and thus possess
the logos, and those who do not. However, both parties need to comprehend
22 Introduction
each other’s speech such that rulers can issues orders and the rest can obey. Hence
the very possibility of social inequality depends on a prior equality in the form
of the capacity to understand. This equality, Rancière notes, ‘gnaws away at any
[so-called] natural order’94 and thereby creates the ever present possibility for
the freedom of the demos to emerge and challenge any social order.
This detour through the classics enables Rancière to identify ‘politics’ as
the moment when the freedom of the people emerges in contrast to any par-
ticular identity that belongs to the people as a particular party within society.
It causes the part that has no part to identify with everybody else in society in
the name of a universal equality: ‘politics’ is simply this assertion of equality
whereby equality is understood not as ‘a value to which one appeals’ but as ‘a
universal that must be supposed, verified and demonstrated in each case’.95
Nor does this mean that he is claiming that universality is the underlying
essence of any particular community, just that it works here as a ‘logical
operator’96 by which any attempt to partition community can be undermined.
Rancière’s ‘politics’ does not belong exclusively to any particular identified
grouping such as ‘the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern
proletariat’ since in each enactment of ‘politics’ the part that has no part
asserts equality with the rest whoever they may be.97 Rancière does not
prioritise one narrative of struggle over another, or one identity of the
oppressed over another, but instead provides a formal way of thinking about
how struggle against domination emerges and is structured.
Rancière challenges what we commonly understand politics to be: the
business of running the state, electioneering and parties, governing or chal-
lenging the government; or even, in many cases, signing petitions, going on
marches, joining organisations or going on strike. Everyday politics is
renamed by Rancière as ‘the police’. This term is used to denote the everyday
system of order, with its accompanying governance, policymaking and
accepted forms of protest and challenge. His use of the term ‘police’ is pecu-
liarly French and old-fashioned, referring to its use from the fourteenth cen-
tury to denote public order, the realm of citizenship and administration of the
public sphere.98 Although this change in usage was made famous by Michel
Foucault’s work on policing as a mode of government, associated strongly
with modes of disciplining and organising bodies,99 Rancière’s adoption of
the term denotes more strongly the sense of policing as ‘a rule’ governing the
appearance of bodies, ‘a configuration of occupations and the properties of the
spaces where these occupations are distributed’.100 For Rancière, police ‘is
thus first an order of bodies that defines 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’.101 In his particular terminology, policing is the
ordering of who has what, how they act and how they speak, while politics is
that which breaks with this order.
Importantly, as will be emphasised in Chapter 1, Rancière does not con-
ceive that it is ever possible to exist outside of police order since it merely
refers to the way in which we create meaning within our lives and organise
Introduction 23
our everyday existence. Police order is another way of denoting the ordering
of society. It is not necessarily negative, but neither is it positive. It is just the
way we live. Within this framework it makes no sense to speak of overturning
police order. ‘Politics’ is that which changes or challenges any particular
configuration of police ordering, forcing it to be reconfigured.
Rancière often uses the term ‘emancipation’ to refer to the process by
which a subject breaks with police order to enact ‘politics’. The aforemen-
tioned claims about disentangling emancipation from domination return us to

what he claims is the original meaning of emancipation as ‘escape from a
minority’102 which is intimately linked to the moment of subjectivation: the
moment in which a political subject is formed. Emancipation cannot be
understood as a demand or pressure put upon the other but is ‘always a proof
simultaneously given to oneself ’.103 This is why he claims that ‘nobody
escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts’104 since it is only
through seeing oneself as being equal to others and acknowledging that this
equality is not apparent in the social order that one would be motivated to
challenge this.
But why is Rancière so keen to think about emancipation in this way? This
definition accords with the claim that the moment of politics demonstrates
universality, when the separate parts of society can no longer be justified and
any minority disappears. It also introduces the notion of the hierarchy of
relations between those who govern and those who are governed, those who
have the major part in society and those who have the minor. If emancipation
is something done for somebody, that still places the emancipated in a rela-
tion of debt to the emancipator, which means we cannot override the initial
relations of domination. Rancière recalls that the term was not used in
Roman law to refer to the freeing of a slave but the freeing of a son from the
paternal authority such that he can make his own way in the world as an
adult. In this sense it still referred to a prior relation of dependence but was
also a moment that is initiated by the master who emancipates the other. Yet
if we return to the meaning of the word ‘emancipation’ which comes from the
Latin words ‘ex’ and ‘mancipium’ meaning ‘away’ or ‘from’ and ‘ownership’
or ‘taking in hand’ we see no relation of dependence. Instead, it is merely the
emergence from authority – howsoever that may be achieved.
As will be argued in Chapter 2, Rancière figures emancipation in contrast
to domination, not as a binary pairing but as two logics that constitute the
field in which the self is both constituted and constituting.105 Emancipation is
not a state in which the self can exist beyond the confines of the police order,
but given that we can never escape from the social it is merely the assertion of
the equality of the subject in spite of the forces of domination. In asserting
this equality the political subject is brought into being. By defining emanci-
pation in this way Rancière argues that emancipation and emancipatory
movements are often thwarted not by external opposition but by their inter-
nal, often well-meaning, intentions. The aim to emancipate others rather than
to contribute to conditions under which they can emancipate themselves
24 Introduction
ensures that domination is maintained through the continuation of ties of
indebtedness between the liberator and the liberated. By emphasising that
emancipation is something that the dominated have to do for themselves
Rancière provokes a rethink of how emancipatory movements conceive of
themselves and their political aims.
Consequently, democratic governance does not actually result in the prac-
tice of democracy (although we will see that Rancière does suggest that the
modern emergence of democratic government has supported democratic
practice). This is because democracy in its instantiation of radical universal
equality is fleeting; it is the moment when the principle of universal equality is
enacted. However, such equality cannot be instituted because as soon as we
try to establish it we have to define it in a particular way as equality of
something in particular or in one particular capacity or another. This means
that in every instance of equality we will necessarily prioritise one form of
equality over others, and however good we may think this to be, we will
always overlook the claims of some in favour of others. Thus democracy as a
state of total equality can never exist, and the impossible institutionalisation
of universal equality takes place in brief moments which may inspire changes
in our contemporary order but which do not last.
Setting out from equality

This book does not imply that these practices are new since many of the
practices and strategies outlined here are already used by political movements
and activist groups. However, by theorising democratic practices more pre-
cisely it seeks to help us to think in greater detail about how democracy is not
something that just appears spontaneously at a demonstration or on the bar-
ricades but is a mode of subjectivation supported by a collection of practices
which work to challenge the conditions under which police order imposes
consensus at such high costs. By theorising democracy in this way, I aim to
focus not only on how to resist consensus but on how to subvert it: to move
towards worlds in which measures of democracy are not reduced to turn out
statistics used to evaluate a stupid, apathetic, ignorant and immoral populace
in need of ever more repressive regimes of order and control. Worlds in which
resentment, hatred and misery are not strong enough to sanction war or
terror of the kind that produces drone strikes, suicide bombings and torture.
Worlds in which poverty and inequality no longer drive deep divisions
between residents of states, cities, boroughs and streets, propagating hostility,
segregation and fear. This book suggests that in the face of our current con-
figuration of order it might be worth experimenting with strategies of equality
and practices of reflexivity, aversivity, poeticity and absurdity in the hope that
they will help us to respond to Rancière’s call to overthrow the dominant
ordering of ‘cheerful consensus’ and its respective ‘denial of humanity’;106 to
restore the visibility of ‘politics’107 by reinvigorating the promise and possibility
of emancipation.
Introduction 25
Notes
1 (1999: 101).
2 Rancière distinguishes politics from democracy . Democracy for him refers to the
forms of subjectivation of politics. Such language sounds strange, perhaps even
distasteful, to contemporary readers and jars uncomfortably with more familiar
terminology of contemporary political thought. As we will see, part of Rancière’s
project of ‘reinventing politics’ is to draw attention to vocabularies that have
fallen out of usage, for example worker, poor, proletarian. It is important to note
that these terms are not used here to denote a pre-existing sociological category.
Instead their meaning is constituted simply through the emergence of a group as
a political player.
3 Rancière (2009a: 114).
4 Rancière (2011a: 15).
5 Rancière (2009a: 116).
6 Rancière (2011b: xvi).
7 Or at least pertaining to certain aspects of democracy such as legitimation,
accountability, representation, inclusivity and participation. See, for example,
Pateman (1970); Habermas (1975); Barber (1984); Young (1990, 2002); Tully
(1995); Held (1998); Dahl (1998); Dryzek (2000); Mouffe (2000); Fitzpatrick
(2002); Crouch (2004); Tilly (2004).
8 For example, increasing support for France’s Front National, the British
National Party (BNP) in the United Kingdom, Golden Dawn in Greece, the
Dutch Freedom party in the Netherlands, Jobbik in Hungary, the Danish Peo-
ples’ Party, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Swedish Democrats, and the
Norwegian Progress party, all of which have seen substantially increased mem-
bership over last couple of decades. See Eatwell and Goodwin (2010) and Copsey
(2011) for more on the BNP in the UK; Hainsworth (2008) and Bartlett et al.
(2011) for further details on the extreme right in Western Europe; and Skocpol
and Williamson (2013) for a nuanced reading of the rightist nature of the Tea
Party movement in the USA.
9 Many would argue that there has been no significantly increased risk to Western
lives since 9/11.
10 Fewer people are members of political parties than ever before in the modern
democratic era (van Biezen et al. 2012). Although turnout is not so bad in the
USA it is low enough to be of concern in the UK and the general trend is that it
is falling throughout Europe and North America (Niemi et al. 2010). Discussion
about the lack of choice and disillusionment facing voters in the UK gained
attention through Jeremy Paxman’s high-profile interview with British comedian
Russell Brand in 2015. Following the interview, in which he upbraided Brand for
never having voted and for advocating the boycotting of elections, Paxman
admitted that he himself had not voted in a recent local election.
11 Della Porta (2013, in particular Ch. 2).
12 Stuckler and Basu (2013); Sitrin and Azzellini (2014); World Food Programme
(2016).
13 Harvey (2012: 164).
14 Graeber (2013: 302).
15 Sitrin and Azzellini (2014: 5).
16 Mason (2013: 261).
17 Badiou (2012).
18 Douzinas and Žižek (2010: viii).
19 Chomsky (2012: 24).
20 Douzinas and Žižek (2013: vii).
21 The proceedings were published in Douzinas and Žižek (2010).
26 Introduction
22 See in particular Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004, 2009); Badiou (2010a); Žižek
(2009); Dean (2012); Graeber (2013).
23 For examples of how these debates have played out in recent protests see Grae-
ber (2013); Mason (2013); Sitrin and Azzelini (2014).
24 Badiou (2010a).
25 Hardt (2010); Negri (2010); and see in particular Hardt and Negri (2009: 118).
26 Žižek (2009, 2010, 2012, 2013); plus Dean (2012, 2013).
27 Graeber (2013: 293).
28 Badiou (2010b: 5).

29 Rancière (2010d: 173).
30 Bosteels (2010: 61); see also Bosteels (2014: 237).
31 Hallward (2010: 128).
32 Dean (2012: 241); Žižek (2013: 189); see also Žižek (2002: 297).
33 See, for example, Amnesty International’s reports on abuse, intimidation and
ongoing impact on protestors and those who supported them in Turkey, Egypt
and Bahrain (2013a, 2013b, 2014).
34 Žižek (2012, 2013); Dean (2012).
35 See, for example, Douzinas and Žižek (2010: vii); Douzinas (2013); Hardt (2010);
Hardt and Negri (2011); Žižek (2013); Graeber (2013); Mason (2013); Harvey
(2014); even Sitrin and Azzelini (2014) use this language despite encouraging us
to reject its outcomes.
36 See Butler and Athanasiou (2013: Ch. 14).
37 Rancière (2012b: n.p.).
38 Rancière (2010d: 167).
39 Ibid.: 176.
40 Dean (2012: 63, see also 2009a).
41 Dean (2009a, 2009b).
42 Dean (2009a: 5).
43 Ibid.: 105.
44 Ibid.: 35.
45 See Dean’s discussion of this (ibid.: 21). Here she seems, to have agonistic theory
(Connolly 2005; Honig 1993; and Mouffe 2005) in mind.
46 Dean (2009a: 21).
47 Dean (2009b: 94).
48 Dean (2009a: 17).
49 Rancière (1999: Ch. 5).
50 Ibid.: 102.
51 Ibid.: 101–102.
52 Ibid.: 113.
53 Rancière (2007b: 106).
54 Rancière (2011a: 16).
55 Rancière (1995a: 70).
56 Dean (2009a: 23).
57 Ibid.: 21.
58 Rancière has made it clear in Dis-agreement (1999) that he does not think that
‘politics’ – which for him is always democratic – can be institutionalised, and
consequently does not think that we live in democracies today. Instead he would
categorise Western forms of government as oligarchic (see also Rancière 2006a: 73).
59 Brown (1999).
60 Dean (2009a and 2009b).
61 Badiou (2006: 273).
62 Rancière (2009a: 118).
63 See Frank (2015) on this.
64 Rancière (2009a: 118).
Introduction 27
65 Cf. Brown (2015) who asserts the need to keep searching for leftist alternatives,
but is more cautious and pessimistic in her approach. In contrast to this, Ran-
cière’s writing conveys an inspiringly casual confidence. He does not fret that
leftist imaginaries are weaker now than they have ever been. He does not imply
that we need to theorise an alternative approach, but that so many alternative
approaches already exist – that we have nothing to search for. Instead he seems
to want to see what happens if we just assume that we can do ‘politics’ differently
and get on with demonstrating this.
66 Rancière et al. (2008: 183).

67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Rancière (1999: 101).
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.: 183.
72 Ibid.
73 At this point it is worth noting that Rancière rejects the theory-practice debate
(see, for example, Rancière 2011b: xv). This will be returned to later in the
chapter.
74 See Devenney (2011) for further elaboration of the politics of the proper versus
the improper.
75 The Western tradition has long hailed the emergence of democracy in Ancient
Athens in the fifth century BC as the time when democracy was invented.
However, more recent scholarship suggest that democratic forms of government
first emerged in Mesopotamia before 2000 BC. This does not challenge the fact
that Western thought about democracy has long drawn on classical texts to
inform us about what the ancients thought about democracy.
76 Rancière (1999: 1) citing Aristotle (1992, 1253 a 9–17: 60).
77 Rancière (1999: 3).
78 Ibid.: 4.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.: 7.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.: 8.
83 Ibid., italics in the original.
84 Ibid.
86 Ibid., italics added.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.: 9.
89 Ibid.: 11.
90 Aristotle (1992, 1294 a 19–20: 260).
91 Rancière (1999: 11–12).
92 Ibid.: 11.
93 Ibid.: 16.
94 Ibid.
95 Rancière (1995a: 65).
96 Ibid.
97 Rancière (1999: 9).
98 Etymologically linked to the Ancient Greek ‘polis’ meaning city state and to
‘policy’ for matters of everyday administration and governance.
99 E.g. Foucault (1991).
100 Rancière (1999: 29, italics in the original).
101 Ibid.
102 Rancière (2007a: 48).
28 Introduction
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 See Chapter 5 for more on the intersections between Rancière and Foucault’s
work on the self.
106 Rancière (1999: 140).
107 Rancière (2007b: 106).
1 Equality
The twisted path of emancipation
The democratic experience … means starting from the point of view of equal-
ity, asserting equality, assuming equality as a given, working out from equality,
trying to see how productive it can be and thus maximizing all possible liberty
and equality.
Equality is central to Rancière’s ‘politics’. It is the axle that brings ‘politics’

into existence.2 Yet this equality is not a ‘value’ with already proscribed content.
It is not ‘a goal; it is a starting point, an opinion or a presupposition which
opens the field of possible verification’.3 It is formally empty but in every instance
in which it is employed it is filled in with content that is context-specific but
always invokes equality with the rest. In a struggle against racial segregation
it may be filled in as the equality of black citizens; in a struggle for land rights
it may become the equality of landless peasants; in a dispute over working condi-
tions it may involve the equality of workers; in a struggle for women’s rights it
may be the equality of women. All of these instances will effect transformation
by demonstrating that the party in question is equal to everybody else. Hence
Rancière tells us that ‘equality exists … to the extent that it is enacted’.4 It is an
enactment – a staging – that proves the capacity of those previously thought to be
incapable, in whichever way is relevant in the given context.
As noted in the Introduction, the enactment of equality is only possible due
to the capacity of humans to communicate with one another. For human
beings to exist together they need to be able to communicate. Even when the
terms of their existence are profoundly unequal the very existence of this
inequality depends on a prior equality in terms of their capacity to commu-
nicate even if this is only in order for masters to give orders and slaves to
carry them out. This ‘Achilles heel’ underlies all order and holds out possibi-
lity to those suffering any form of domination since it demonstrates that in some
sense, human beings share intelligence – they are equal in their capacity to
communicate about whatever order they exist in together. This leads Rancière
to identify a second principle:
30 Equality
intelligence is not divided, it is one. It is not the intelligence of the master
or the intelligence of the student, the intelligence of the legislator or the
intelligence of the artisan, etc. Instead it is the intelligence that does not
fit any specific position in a social order but belongs to anybody as the
intelligence of anybody.5
Thus the possibility always exists, however slight, for some form of commu-
nication about the very terms of the order and for even the most entrenched
of orders to change. The use of the term ‘communication’ here is not meant
to evoke already existing theories of communication. For Rancière, commu-
nication is radically open and need not necessarily take the form of speech,
nor conform to already existing rules concerning things such as rationality,
order or any other pre-specified criteria. As a result, emancipation of the domi-
nated is always a possibility since its key component is ever present in every
human society where communication of any sort is effected: ‘Emancipation
then means the appropriation of this intelligence which is one, and the verification
of the potential of the equality of intelligence’.6 Hence, for Rancière, emancipa-
tion simply requires the exploitation of this equal capacity for communication
in order to demonstrate the underlying equality of intelligence.
Despite the promise of these principles, Rancière’s work has had a mixed
reception. His ‘politics’/police framework has been heavily criticised because
many readers are worried that this apparent binary opposition actually
obscures and hinders social change rather than helping us to understand it.
These critiques can be grouped into three overarching concerns: that ‘politics’
is impossible to plan; it is rare, unavailable and narrow to the extent that it
refuses to recognise the political import of our everyday lives; and it is weak
and ineffective. I will argue that through a careful reading of the examples of
‘politics’ offered by Rancière we can identify three elements within the
moment of ‘politics’: appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. A
focus on these helps us to respond to these critiques to posit that while his
‘politics’ cannot be planned it can be made more likely and is available to all.
Although reflection upon Rosa Parks’ protest on the Montgomery buses in
the 1950s indicates that Rancière has not emphasised clearly enough the
extent to which politics’ effects depends on the strategies it employs, I will
suggest that this does not counter the claims he makes about ‘politics’ but
simply indicates that the value of the ‘politics’/police framework depends on a
clearer articulation of the strategies that ‘politics’ involves. Thus we can
counter all three concerns and instead argue that ‘politics’ is about strategy
and meaning. ‘Politics’ simply concerns how to effect change, and hence
whether or not it appears to be unpredictable, weak and rare, or planned,
effective and everyday, does not depend on any particular qualities inherent in
Rancière’s formulation of ‘politics’ but on the strategies used to effect it. I will
conclude by elaborating its potential through a brief discussion centred on
recent strategies of occupation to think about how his work could be of value
for democratic protest today.
Equality 31
‘Politics’ as appropriation, subjectivation and dis-identification
Let us first consider that ‘politics’ comprises three constituent moments. The
first, appropriation, is clearly apparent in all of Rancière’s examples: when
discussing the Roman plebeian revolt on the Aventine Hill, he refers to the
plebs as appropriating the speech of their masters;7 the poet workers of
nineteenth-century Paris appropriate bourgeois habits and pursuits;8 during
his trial the socialist activist Auguste Blanqui appropriates ‘proletarian’ as an

occupation in a way that had not previously been used to refer to the working
class as a whole;9 while pausing in laying a floor, Gauny the carpenter
appropriates a view from a bourgeois mansion;10 and the striking worker tai-
lors appropriate bourgeois fashions and customs.11 In her recent book
Democracy and the Foreigner, Bonnie Honig refers to such moments as ‘tak-
ings’: the taking of rights or ways of life that are yours according to the
democratic value of equality, but have not been accorded to you in a parti-
cular system due to your identity as immigrant or ‘other’.12 This is a helpful
way to figure ‘politics’ but only partly goes to identify how it operates as a
break with the police.
In comparing the above examples it becomes apparent that the appropria-
tion is not simply a material taking but the taking of a ‘way’ – as described in
Rancière’s oft-repeated phrase ‘ways of being, doing and saying’.13 This refers
back to Rancière’s claim that ‘politics’ is the struggle over the justifications
that are given for why different people have access to different material
resources. In the case of Rosa Parks she appropriated the white man’s actions,
or ways of doing. The Roman plebeians appropriated the patricians’ speech,
or ways of saying, Blanqui appropriates the designated terms of identification,
the ways of being, given by the dominant order which in this case is a recog-
nised list of professions, and inserts the wrong term, an unplaceable term, into
it: proletarian. Hence although an appropriation will always take place by
operating on the material with the material (Rosa Parks keeps her seat on the
bus, the worker tailors wear clothes similar to those of their masters) it does
so to challenge the symbolic justification that allots material things and places
according to ways.
This may seem to be a moot point, given that in practice it is impossible for
ideas to be separated from the material: ‘Ideas always are material realities,
taking over bodies, giving them a map of the visible and orientations for
moving’.14 However, an idea (albeit always entangled in materiality) does
have to occur somewhere to begin with. It is conceivable that one could act
on the material to stage equality and, although one’s own symbolic order has
changed one may not succeed in having any impact on the wider symbolic
order at all. Likewise, the distribution of the material could be effected dif-
ferently but this distribution might be perceived as a mistake or an accident
and then corrected rather than accepted as a new order. In order to redis-
tribute ways of being, saying and doing in order to effect change to ways of
having, the justification upon which that redistribution happens needs to be
32 Equality
accepted more widely. Hence conceptually there is a valid distinction to be
made here, even if in practice we can never separate ideas from the material.
Turning back to the appropriations mentioned above we can see that each
one is productive. Although ‘politics’ functions as ‘politics’ because it is a
break with the current configuration of order and therefore is important not
because of its content, but because of its failure to reproduce the dominant
ways of being, saying or doing, this does not mean that it does not have
content. It simply means that the content is not prioritised in its structural
function. However, the content is important in the sense that it is necessary
for the appropriation to stage a persuasive challenge to the dominant order
such that it appears to offer a viable alternative to current ways of being,
saying or doing. This means, first, that ‘politics’ needs to create rather than
disrupt. Disruption is disorder, whereas ‘politics’ is that which stands between
order and disorder.15 Second, this ‘viability’ is not limited to that which
others will approve in advance as being viable, but on the ability of its staging
to appear permanent and not temporary. By positing a potentially permanent
alternative way of being, saying or doing ‘politics’ emphasises the contingency
of the current ordering. Thus the staging of ‘politics’ is about the production
of different ways of being, saying or doing that could replace those that cur-
rently exist, not necessarily with the longer-term aim of doing so but rather to
demonstrate in the short term the contingency of the current configuration.
Now that we have clarified the type of ‘taking’ that appropriation involves,
we can see that it is this that is able to take us out of the existing police order
because rather than relating to the dominant order in the expected sub-
servient manner the subjects take the rights before they are given, proving
their equal status in the face of the opinions that others might have of them.16
This adds a second constituent feature of ‘politics’: its function as a moment
of subjectivation – the moment when a new subject emerges. No longer
relating to the dominant order as a subordinate, the subject is one who asserts
his/her right against his/her master, but as an equal who, in that moment, is in
charge of his/her own actions.17 We will return to this in the discussion below
where it will be shown that subjectivation is essential for ‘politics’.
The third constituent feature of ‘politics’ is dis-identification from allotted
roles. This comes about through the process of appropriation.18 It refers to
the ‘removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject
space where anyone can be counted … where a connection is made between
having a part and having no part’.19 In each of the above examples of ‘poli-
tics’ the appropriation effects dis-identification by breaking the link between
the subject and their expected or given roles. Subjects thereby break with the
ways of being they are meant to effect in the spaces they have been assigned.
Such dis-identification is seen to happen in ‘politics’ in the realisation that
one’s given identification or allotted role is incomplete in some way; that
assigned positions no longer make sense thereby making acceptance of iden-
tification impossible. This is apparent in Rancière’s description of subaltern
uprisings in Dis-agreement. First, we see that the Scythian slave revolt was
Equality 33
effective as long as the slaves dis-identified with their given role and behaved
as warriors (thereby mimicking their masters). However, as soon as they were
treated as slaves again they accepted their allotted position, began to behave
once more as slaves, and the revolt was done for.20 In contrast, Ballanche’s
aforementioned retelling of the more successful Roman plebeian revolt on the
Aventine Hill recounts how the plebeians imitated the ruling patricians by
giving themselves representatives, consulting oracles, and expressing ‘intelli-
gence’. They stopped identifying with their allotted role, and instead made ‘a
place in the symbolic order of the community … a community that does not
yet have any effective power’, thereby violating the order of the city.21 As the
plebs kept up this behaviour the senators were consequently compelled to talk
to them and to treat them with the kind of respect not previously accorded to
them. By dis-identifying with their allotted role, acting ‘like men’ rather than
mere mortals,22 the plebeians forced the hand of the patricians and won
recognition that overturned their contemporary order.
Dis-identification is a challenge to the existing community because it
momentarily leaves those who dis-identify without a place – they are Ran-
cière’s ‘part-that-has-no-part’ – those who appropriate that which in the eyes
of the police order is not rightfully assigned to them. This is a subversion of the
dominant order. The existence of this new grouping is a challenge to the existing
community because it has no place in its logic. Through dis-identification
with this logic it posits the-part-that-has-no-part as politically salient: a new
grouping rather than an already existing people. This is reflected in Blanqui’s
trial.23 When asked his profession by a magistrate Blanqui replied ‘proletar-
ian’. We are informed by Rancière that this old Roman judicial category was
previously used to refer to those whose role was merely to reproduce and who
were excluded from the symbolic order of the political community.24 During
Blanqui’s revolutionary era, however, the term had been taken up by
nineteenth-century Parisian workers in affirmation of their collective exclu-
sion, applicable across the board to all those, regardless of specific profession,
who were forced to sell their labour and endure the misery of the workshop.
At first the magistrate would not accept this response, denying that ‘proletar-
ian’ was a profession, yet Blanqui’s reply25 used the term to dis-identify with
those already recognised partial, particular professions and their associated
identities (e.g. bricklayer, joiner, mason or tailor), which denoted one’s place
in that order. He challenged the magistrate to recognize the shared hardship,
regardless of their separate professions, of those whose poverty of existence
had up until then been denied and who consequently had not been assigned
an equal place of their own within its borders. Consequently, dis-identification
breaks with given roles in a way that makes it impossible to place it within the
already existing configuration of identities.
By drawing out the roles of appropriation, subjectivation and dis-identification
in any moment of ‘politics’ we can see that there is a place for strategy and
hence for social movements to build and motivate ‘politics’. Armed with this
understanding we can now turn to consider how it may help us to respond to
34 Equality
the aforementioned concerns that Rancière is wrong to conceptualise ‘politics’
as rare, narrow and ineffective.
‘Politics’ can be willed

Alongside Dean, some commentators assert that Rancière does not help us to
think about the future of politics because although he comments on what is

wrong with our current situation his conception of ‘politics’ as a moment of
rupture or of ‘heroic change’26 artificially separates this moment from the
social in a way that is unnecessary, and is thus unable to inform us about how
to move forward and construct something better. In response to this, it is
illuminating to examine some of the examples of ‘politics’ that Rancière pro-
vides us with to show how, first, we can draw upon his work to thematise key
elements within the police ordering that are needed if we are to effect ‘poli-
tics’; and second, that there is danger in following the advice of the critics to
focus on police order if this distracts us from the workings of politics. Not
only does this indicate why Rancière initially establishes such a sharp dis-
tinction between ‘politics’ and police but also indicates to us that in order to
remedy his apparent neglect of the police we need to consider the relationship
between police and ‘politics’ in more detail, and not simply turn our attention
to the police order.
In order to understand why this concern has arisen let us examine the claim
that Rancière’s ‘politics’ is inattentive or even closed to the more ordinary
moments of everyday struggle and with this in mind consider the example of
Rosa Parks’ protest on the Montgomery buses on 1 December 1955. Rancière’s
account of the event is as follows:
The young black woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who, one day …

decided to remain in her seat on the bus, which was not hers, in this way
decided that she had, as a citizen of the United States, the rights she did
not have as an inhabitant of a State that banned the use of such seats to
individuals with one-sixteenth or more parts of ‘non-Caucasian’ blood.
And the Blacks of Montgomery who, a propos of this conflict between a
private person and a transportation company, decided to boycott the
company, really acted politically, staging the double relation of exclusion
and inclusion inscribed in the duality of the human being and the
citizen.27
Indeed, this is corroborated by Rosa Parks’ memoirs which record that she
decided to remain in her seat not because she was physically tired, but
because she was making a stand: ‘People always say that I didn’t give up my
seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically … I was
not old … the only tired I was, was tired of giving in’.28
Rancière’s keen focus on the moment of Parks’ protest itself and not on the
background manoeuvrings that enabled this moment to happen (manoeuvrings
Equality 35
that many of us would refer to as politics in the non-Rancièrian sense) does
seem to corroborate the critics’ aforementioned concern: neglecting the very stuff
that motivated Parks’ action. Indeed, we can see from her memoirs that she
recalls being inspired by a conscious desire to challenge the social order, since
the phrase ‘to not give in’ suggests awareness of something that she is not
giving in to. It can be surmised that this attitude was at least influenced, if not
formulated, by her attendance at the Highlander Folk School, an education

centre for workers’ rights and racial equality only two months before the bus
incident in Montgomery on 1 December 1955, and while she was closely
involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(hereafter NAACP). Parks was well aware that the NAACP’s strategists were
seeking a platform for a legal challenge to the racial segregation laws,29
making it fair to surmise that the political significance of Parks’ action came
about because the racial equality movement existed, knew that an action was
needed, and was actively looking for the chance to enact one. So, when Ran-
cière says that we cannot plan or will politics to happen (it cannot be ‘set up
in advance’30) it does appear that he is ignoring the work of such a move-
ment, for surely the success of Parks’ action benefited from her own pre-
parations and the ability of the NAACP to rally support for the following
boycotts and demonstrations. Furthermore, by denoting all of this as simply
‘police’ it can be argued that he does overlook the variation in police orders –
leaving his framework without the language to meaningfully distinguish
between social configurations where racial segregation is and is not in
operation.31
However, this claim is a little too strong, for when we compare Rancière’s
examples of ‘politics’ we can see that this ‘politics’ does have a notable func-
tion that is distinguishable from the police order for we repeatedly find that it
is comprised of a combination of certain distinct features, appropriation and
dis-identification, which operate within a moment (not necessarily a moment
of protest) to bring about ‘politics’. This implies that the background social
planning and manoeuvring of social movements will often be critical but
crucially will never be sufficient in supporting and motivating such ‘politics’.
This observation will enable us to sketch a template for leftist strategy (see
below). Furthermore, referring to all social order as police is neither to deni-
grate nor to reduce all orders as simply as bad as each other. Instead it is
merely to emphasise the way in which any order – however good/better it may
seem – will constrain and exclude (an issue that also concerned Dean – see
above), such that even after segregation has been abolished, black citizens
continue to face discrimination and injustice. Hence the function served by
referring to all social order as ‘police’ is not so grand as to prioritise a
digression from this as a ‘heroic moment’, but simply to emphasise the role of
‘politics’ as the point at which we can break with these patterns in order to
open up spaces for change.
With regard to Dean’s related concerns in the Introduction that the left
merely seeks visibility and not power, we can see that visibility is important,
36 Equality
but not for the left as much as for those whom the left is traditionally con-
cerned about – the dominated and the excluded. Such strategies enable sub-
jects not only to be visible as an already existing group within an order but to
challenge the configuration of that order in their emergence. They therefore
prompt us to think about the most effective manner of staging an injustice in
such a way that can tear open the sensible order. The aforementioned ‘mar-
ches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions’ outlined by Dean are not
necessarily destined to fail, but unless they are to enact some form of appro-
priation and dis-identification they will not suffice to bring about ‘politics’. I
acknowledge that this claim alone does not address all of Dean’s concerns,
but when united with other features of Rancière’s work outlined below it
could indicate a rather different strategic priority than the reformation of the
communist party.32 The work of the NAACP in the aforementioned Rosa
Parks example, prompting appropriation and dis-identification, demonstrates
the importance of a strong and strategic supporting movement to support and
manage a staging of equality in order to increase its capacity for change.
Accordingly, although Rancière’s critics are right to note that his analysis
neglects the background work of social movements in building to a moment
of ‘politics’, it is clear from this example that this need not mean that we
ourselves cannot attend to the role of social movements in effecting ‘politics’.
The ordinary in the extraordinary: how to decide between

‘politics’ or police
The second concern focuses on the claim that Rancière’s conceptualisation
does not give enough credit to the everyday moments in our lives that may
contribute to, or lay the groundwork for, the much grander-sounding
moments of ‘politics’. Rancière denotes ‘politics’ as rare, and thus appears to
refuse to acknowledge as ‘politics’ that which we commonly understand to be
political (such as social movements, political organisations and institutional
politics). Instead he relabels these as part of the police order. Hence Rancière
appears to neglect the variation between police orders, and the scope of what
we might consider everyday ‘ordinary’ politics of citizen struggles, constitu-
tions and assemblies to effect some level of emancipation.33 As a result critics
suggest that in order better to understand political resistance we need to pay
greater attention to this police order34 because it is here that we can begin to
effect immediate change. In the rest of this book I will refer to this group of
concerns as the worry that Rancière’s politics is too narrow.35
In addressing this concern it is helpful to note that subsequent to Dis-
agreement Rancière has clarified that his claim that ‘politics’ is ‘rare’ was not
to distinguish simply between ‘politics’ as a moment of insurrection ‘after
which everything comes back to mere apathy’ but first, we should not assume,
following Foucault, that there is ‘politics’ simply because ‘there are always
relations of power’,36 and second, ‘that what politics means can best be
understood from the moments when the power of anybody emerges most
Equality 37
37
significantly’. Hence when Rancière refers to the everyday ordering of the
social as the police he does not seek to denigrate it but merely to indicate the
distinction between action that ruptures our order and opens space for new
possibilities, in contrast with that which does not. This distinction remains
important in order to enable him to emphasise that despite the presence of
strong and active social movements we cannot plan or will that ‘politics’ will
take place, nor that it will have a particular effect, because a reaction to any
staging of equality cannot be guaranteed.38 Such a break ‘can happen any-
where at any time’ but ‘can never be calculated’.39 Thus a break of the sen-
sory order will happen within the everyday but will split it open, thereby
making the ordinary extraordinary.
Consequently, his use of the ‘politics’/police framework acts as a warning
that we must not presume that all that is needed is for a movement to build
any counter-imaginary; if it is to be democratic it must be a movement that
posits universality built on an egalitarian counter-imaginary rather than any
specific identity. In Rosa Parks’ case, where racial equality was the aim,
Rancière is telling us that it was the imaginary of a world functioning without
segregation that motivated and supported Parks’ action. Despite her staging
only making clearly visible one feature of the inequality faced by black people
in the USA (the segregation), it is clear from her biography and the actions of
the NAACP that the counter-imaginary it painted did also seek to tackle
other issues of inequality such as the division of labour and wider socialist
politics as taught by the Highlander Folk School. The counter-imaginary
built by the NAACP at this time provided an alternative narrative of a world
where everyone would be included and where the distinction of skin colour
would be of no relevance. Thus for such a moment to have an effect as ‘poli-
tics’, identification with an alternative grouping, for example on grounds of
race, gender, or another ‘disadvantaged sector’,40 is not required; instead, it is
simply necessary to see oneself as ‘include-able’ with everyone, as equals.
According to Rancière, the success of the civil rights movement was not an
assertion of a separate or superior black identity but the assertion of black
equality with everyone else.
Similarly, he describes the claims for equality made by the Parisian worker
tailors who engaged in the strikes of 1833 and 1840 as needing to be achieved
by way of qualitatively new solidarity: not just their rediscovered power

as a group imposing its law on its masters, but also a newly achieved
universality entailing its recognition and establishing proper social rela-
tions that will sanction the place of workers in the kingdom of reason
and civilization.41
Thus it is only in such a way that a new configuration of equality can be

introduced where workers are brought into a more qualitatively equal relation
of co-existence with their masters. Rancière tells us that ‘politics’ is ‘where
you create a stage where you include your enemy, even if your enemy does not
38 Equality
want to be included’.42 Indeed, the tailors’ demands do not divide them from
the community or draw lines of demarcation between groups. Instead, they
proscribe how their shared lives are to be reorganised such that both masters
and tailors come together once more, but this time in a new pattern of
relations.
This point is made even more forcefully in Rancière’s discussion of the
Scythian slave revolt.43 He explains that the revolt failed not only because
the slaves failed to continue to act like their masters, but also because their
strategy was flawed:
The Scythian slaves occupy the territory of their former servitude as a

fortified camp and oppose arms with arms. This egalitarian demonstra-
tion at first throws those who thought they were their natural masters.
But when the latter once more show the signs of their difference in nature,
the rebels have no comeback. What they cannot do is transform equality
in war into political freedom. This equality, literally mapped out over the
territory and defended by force of arms, does not create a divided com-
munity. It cannot be transformed into the improper property of that
freedom that establishes the demos simultaneously as both part of and as
the whole of the community.44
Hence, the aim of a military battle is to force your opponents to submit to

your physical strength rather than to pit your reason against theirs. After the
battle the unequal relation of master and slave continues in the relation
between the victor and the defeated. The Scythian slaves did not seek to pit
their reason against the masters’ reason and hence did not claim their place as
speaking beings by demonstrating that they too were political animals. Thus
we see not only that ‘politics’ requires us to play the democratic game of
reason and speech, which cannot be brought about through physical combat,
but also that the subjectivation of ‘politics’ involves subjects portraying their
reason45 as equal to those who dominate them. Two points emerge from this:
the first concerns the strategy of how to do this, and the second the type of
ideology that can inspire ‘politics’.
We will return to the point about strategy in the following section, but the
ideological question concerns a related issue raised by both Dean and Ernesto
Laclau. For Dean, this emerges in the concern that:
[i]f the dominant order presents itself as democratic, if the order of the
police is the order of democracy, then only non-democratic stagings of
disagreement can be politics since only they set up a contrast with the
conditions of their utterance. Far from exclusively democratic, politics
can be fascist, anarchist, imperial, communist.46
Similarly, in Laclau’s interpretation we find concern that ‘the uncounted

might construct their uncountability in ways that are ideologically
Equality 39
incompatible with what either Rancière or [Laclau] would advocate politically
(in a Fascist direction for example)’.47 However, these concerns confuse insti-
tutionalised order with Rancière’s moment of ‘politics’ – which, for Rancière,
is the only time when democratic values are truly at work. He claims that we
should really only recognise democracy as the ‘institution of politics itself ’:48
the moment when ‘any order of distribution … is undermined’.49 Thus there
are two understandings of democracy at work here: the ‘democracy’ that
refers to the institutional framework of our dominant order, or Rancière’s

‘democracy’ of the universal claim to equality that underlies his ‘politics’.
Rancière’s ‘politics’ cannot be fascist, anarchist or communist but neither can
it be ‘democratic’ in the sense of being committed to any particular way of
institutionalising political practice. It is simply not ideological in the tradi-
tional sense that Laclau is drawing on here, because it cannot commit to the
grand narrative of any ideological corpus of the traditional left or right. If
‘politics’ can be said to have any ‘ideology’ at all it is to be found in the form
of a commitment to a universal equality. It is democratic (in Rancière’s usage
of the term) because, instead of being based on a prior body of knowledge, a
view of the world, or human nature, it is based on an axiom that is devoid of
prior content, and is simply ‘its own measure’ of equality. However, this
‘measure never applies directly. It does so only through the enactment of a
wrong’ that demonstrates the ‘mere contingency of equality’.50
Although the dominant order does currently present itself as democratic
Rancière suggests that in practice it can only ever be oligarchic, and will never
be true equal rule because in practice such a thing cannot exist, but will
always be dominated by elites in some sense.51 By dint of this fact, Rancière’s
‘democracy’ in the form of a claim to equality staged via ‘politics’ is always
needed and always possible. It is able to subvert order by voicing the charge
that an order claims to be based on equality, but in actual fact is not. This is
the contradiction that ‘politics’ stages. If the dominant order did not claim to be
democratic there would be no contradiction. ‘Politics’ is therefore a unique
form of protest that aims to prove the inadequacies of any ‘wannabe democracy’.
Furthermore, Rancière’s ‘politics’/police distinction is partly inspired by his
caution not to overly valorise our everyday manoeuvrings within the police
order, for he is aware of the danger of entrenching the alternative identities
that are constructed alongside political movements. In his essay ‘Politics,
Identification, and Subjectivization’ Rancière presents ‘politics’ merely as dis-
identification, because any identification will have to exclude. Dis-identification
as ‘politics’ is merely a break with identification in the name of a universal
postulation of equality and allows its subjects to indicate a gap in the reigning
logic which ‘discloses a social bias’ and becomes the space of ‘a polemical
construction’; a construction of a case of equality, which is neither ‘the act of
an identity’ (for we are told in Dis-agreement that it ‘inscribes a subject name
as being different from any identified part of the community’52), ‘nor …
demonstration of the values specific to a group’ but ‘a process of sub-
jectivization’.53 This insistent denial of a role for identification is important
40 Equality
because it helps us to avoid the confusion of Rancière’s ‘politics’ with that
which is more commonly understood as politics. This is because any identifi-
cation that does emerge from a political movement will be attached to a specific
political project that seeks emancipation for a particular and (by then) already
existing category of persons resulting in the ‘othering’ that comes with any
identity. For example, according to our own political projects, we may assume
that the part-that-has-no-part refers to ‘poor wretched people, homeless and
so on’; however, this means that we may immediately think of specific anti-
poverty or socialist movements as the relevant emancipatory project of ‘poli-
tics’.54 While we may rightly deem such identifications to be appropriate
subjects of ‘politics’ we would be mistaken to confuse this with the claim that
they are the only subject of ‘politics’ now and in the future. Consequently, in
response to Norval’s concerns that every dis-identification is another identifi-
cation,55 this is not to say that ‘politics’ will not emerge off the back of
existing identities or cause new identities to exist, but that we must not
prioritise them – get distracted by them and become too attached to them –
as in so doing we are entrenching a particular ‘police’, a particular world view with
its values and norms and accompanying limits and injustices. In contrast,
Rancière’s ‘politics’ is empty of any particular content and identity other than
the assertion of equality in the face of particular wrong.
Here Rancière is indicating the difference between dis-identification (a
newly asserted universality) and new identifications (a group emerging to
become the new masters in a new configuration of police). Yet this is not to say
that claims to universality can nor will be clearly demarcated from a social
movement with its own imaginary orderings based on new identifications, just
that it is the claim of universality that is doing the work, effecting the break
that is ‘politics’. In acknowledging this we start to realise that the relationship
between ‘politics’ and police is more nuanced than it first appeared.
Indeed, although Rancière’s initial emphasis56 on ‘politics’ and the corre-
sponding neglect of the police, particularly in Dis-agreement, did imply a
distinction between ‘politics’ and police, in order to remedy this he has more
recently sought to clarify the relationship between these two concepts to
emphasise that his ‘politics’ ‘does not stem from a place outside of the police’
for ‘there is no place outside of the police’.57 As noted above, this does not
have to be a bad thing, for it merely emphasises that our social lives will
always depend on some order or other, but it does demonstrate to us the
contingency of that order. Furthermore, by recognising that ‘politics’ there-
fore ‘“takes place” in the space of the police’58 we see that ‘politics’ and
police are not mutually exclusive and in fact ‘politics’ depends on the police in
a rather peculiar way, for it acts upon the objects of the police by establishing
as political (in the Rancièrian sense) things which had, up until now, been
ignored as non-political, and were either not seen to be significant at all or
perhaps simply ‘viewed as “social”, “economic”, or “domestic”’.59
In line with the critics outlined above, in his book The Lessons of Rancière
(2013) Samuel Chambers draws on Rancière’s more recent work to emphasise
Equality 41
that ‘politics’ occurs in the space of the police, and thus it is not as easy as
perhaps first thought to separate ‘politics’ from more ordinary social interac-
tions.60 Although I value Chambers’ reading I prefer to use Rancière’s phrase
‘tangled’ as opposed to Chambers’ preferred term ‘blended’61 to figure the
relationship between ‘politics’ and police, to ensure that we retain our focus
on the way that the effects of ‘politics’ can vary depending on the configura-
tion of forces in the police order. Some configurations of order will be much
less disposed towards any sort of disruption and disorder such that ‘politics’
can be more or less violently repressed and restricted, whereas other config-
urations may actively value and encourage such practices. In seeing ‘politics’
and police as tangled we can identify a vital practice of taking a cautious and
critical approach to all orders – however good we may think them. This means
that contra the claims of the critics above, in order to develop Rancière’s work
we must not just attend to police orders on their own but we must instead
attend more carefully to the relationship between ‘politics’ and the police and
in particular the question of ‘how any order’ comes to be entrenched in the
first place.
‘Politics’ and effectivity

The third concern centres on the claim that Rancière’s thematisation of ‘pol-
itics’ actually appears weak and ineffective. For example, Badiou argues that
while on the one hand Rancière’s writing explodes the myth of emancipation
commonly used to fuel left-wing struggle by showing that any realisation of
equality will fall short of being truly universalising,62 he neglects the next step
which is necessary if we are to motivate emancipatory struggle. This involves
investigating how we could create conditions in which such a positing could
be universalised.63 Badiou thus claims that through Rancière’s work ‘you will
come to know what politics must not be, you will even know what it will have
been and no longer is, but never what it is within the Real, and still less what
one must do in order for it to exist’.64 Furthermore, critics are concerned that
Rancière neglects the organisational nature of any political, or would-be
political, process by remaining silent on the role of political action and mili-
tancy.65 These thinkers claim that to challenge the police order we need to
organise and strategise but Rancière’s failure to focus explicitly on these
topics leads to concern that without organised resistance the status quo will
remain undisturbed. Thus some even go so far as to claim that Rancièrian
politics is simple passivity, ‘an act of faith’66 lacking possibilities for mean-
ingful change such that it is reduced to mere momentary outbursts of resis-
tance.67 In sum, the critics argue that first, we cannot act to bring about
Rancière’s ‘politics’, and that second, it is therefore ineffective: it is fleeting,
momentary and does not last. It cannot therefore bring about any form of
significant and lasting change.
Turning to consider concerns that politics is not ‘effective’, we recall the
quotation above in which Rancière explains that for him ‘politics’ is the
42 Equality
moment ‘when the power of anybody emerges most significantly.’68 He does
not primarily employ the terms ‘politics’ and police to enable us to distinguish
them, rather he seeks to communicate how we might identify what ‘politics’
consists of in terms of social change, and to consider ‘politics’ as a matter of
degrees that are more or less significant or effective. Hence his focus has
always been ‘how can we determine to what extent a “political organisation”
does politics?’69 Yet this means that we may need to reconsider an earlier
passage in Dis-agreement. I quote at length:
Nothing is political in itself. But anything may become political if it gives

rise to the meeting of these two [egalitarian and police] logics. The same
thing – an election, a strike, a demonstration – can give rise to politics or
not give rise to politics. A strike is not political when it calls for reforms
rather than a better deal or when it attacks the relationships of authority
rather than the inadequacy of wages. It is political when it reconfigures
the relationships that determine the workplaces in its relation to the
community. The domestic household has been turned into a political
space not through the simple fact that power relationships are at work in it but
because it was the subject of argument in a dispute over the capacity of women
in the community. The same concept – opinion or law, for example – may
define a structure of political action or a structure of the police order.70
This passage can be qualified further now that we accept that we cannot
always know in advance whether a thing is political or not, and acknowledge
that ‘politics’ is entangled with the police often in ways we may not even
realise. It tells us that although conceptually we may be able to distinguish
‘politics’ from police, in practice it is always going to be less certain. Hence the
most we can say is that a thing will be more political the more the extent to
which it reconfigures the relationships between the subject of the action and
the community.
However, this can lead us onto further problematic territory since it is easy
to assume that the extent to which ‘politics’ can effect change depends on
how receptive the police order is. In order to demonstrate this let us return
once more to the strike demands of the Parisian worker tailors. We are told
that their position close to the bourgeoisie is of importance in influencing the
success of their claims:
These haphazard, fugitive workers get their importance from their position
on the frontier close to the bourgeois people, providing them with the arma-
ments of social distinction and the material resentments of their thinking,
sensitive to the revolutions from above effected through the ascendant
power of fashion and the press. They are almost bourgeois, in a sense.71
This appears to illustrate that a staging most visible to the dominant class,
and hence most effective, would be one that can best bridge the divide
Equality 43
between the dominators and the dominated. Indeed, André Troncin, descri-
bed by Rancière as having a ‘privileged relationship’ with the bourgeoisie,72
was chosen to lead the worker tailor strikes of 1833 and 1840. Despised yet
admired by his masters, Troncin was often imprisoned for his political activ-
ities; however, on his release he would be employed on good terms and even
entrusted with management of their workshops. This seems to lead us to the
conclusion that a political movement seeking to bring about a moment of

‘politics’ that can rupture the police order while also being significant enough
to warrant recognition, must look to stage a contradiction at its most clear, in
order to create a rupture that can bridge the gap between the contemporary
order and the counter-imaginary instead of a rupture that may be disregarded
due to its being too incomprehensible. Yet when interpreted in this way, it can
make Rancière’s ‘politics’ appear maddening, for it does not seem to offer
much to the dominated, since those who suffer the greatest domination are
faced with having to bridge the widest chasm, and are likely be those who are
furthest from the ways and practices of the dominators.73
The stakes at play are even more worrying in the context of the Rosa Parks
example, for although its success was influenced by the role of the NAACP
which helped it to trigger the bus boycotts which were a key turning point in
the emerging civil rights movement, it was not the first action of its kind.
Indeed, just nine months earlier a fifteen-year-old student, Claudette Colvin,
had also refused to move from her seat on the same buses (as no doubt had
countless undocumented others at various times leading up to this moment)
but neither action triggered such a response despite the fact that the NAACP
were ready and willing to rally support since she was not deemed of good
enough character to build a bridge with the white population while avoiding
media denigration.74 So, even more discomforting than the Troncin example,
it seems that Claudette Colvin was deemed too far outside of the reigning
order on two counts: not only was she black but she was also an unmarried
mother, as opposed to Rosa Parks, who by all accounts met the criteria of
social respectability in all features other than the colour of her skin.
Alarmingly, these examples indicate that if ‘politics’ is to be visible within
the police it needs to stage ‘politics’ in a way that is comprehensible within
the police order, and this makes us question the extent of change it can really
offer. Let us recall the concerns of Badiou, Žižek, Dean and others. Does
‘politics’ really offer a way to smash open the police and reorganise the world
in a meaningfully different way as reading Rancière may imply, or is it merely
a way to stage dramatic moments which then get tidied back into an all-
encompassing order with only a few smaller changes to show for it? Rosa
Parks’ protest may well have helped provoke the civil rights movement that
then went on to overcome segregation, but black and ethnic minority popu-
lations continue to suffer disproportionately in Western countries despite the
gains made by civil rights activists.
Yet there is another important element that needs to be discussed here. As
noted above in the discussion of the Scythian slave revolt, the prior step that
44 Equality
enables ‘politics’ is the strategy of asserting one’s reason as equal to those
who dominate despite the fact that one is in an unequal position. This will
not usually be easy – but it would seem that everything rides on the ability to
do this and do it convincingly. Rancière’s ‘politics’ is the moment when this
different, previously unrecognisable ‘reason’ breaks through and is recognised,
thus resulting in the subject of ‘politics’ carving out a new place for the part
that up until then had no part, and this results in a new distribution of the
sensible where all else shifts to accommodate this part.
In The Nights of Labour Rancière tells us that this moment of subjectiva-
tion is the first stage on the path to emancipation. This is the moment in
which one overcomes their hatred, which is necessary, Rancière tells us,
because as long as you hate your master, you affirm his mastery. Therefore, in
order to emancipate oneself one needs first to emancipate one’s outlook – not
to love the master, but simply (indifferently) to relate to the master as an
equal rather than as a subordinate to those who seek to dominate. Hatred
marks out one’s position as subservient:
there is no paradox in the fact that the path of emancipation is first the
path whereon one is liberated from that hatred of the master experienced
by the rebel slave. Servility and hatred are two characteristics of the very
same world, two manifestations of the very same malady. The fact that
the freedman no longer deals with the master but with the ‘old society’
defines not only a forward step in the awareness of exploitation but also
an ascent in the hierarchy of beings and social forms.75
This is not meant as an empty platitude, something with which a worker or

civil rights protestor could be placated and his anger eased. Instead, it is this
that drives the unquenchable thirst for equality which when it catches hold
will soon start to spread for ‘[t]he voluptuousness of emancipation is a fever
from which one cannot be cured and which one cannot help but commu-
nicate’.76 For when one sees oneself as equal to others, but realises that this
equality is not apparent in one’s social role despite the social order’s claims to
democracy, this contradiction will provide the initial motivation to remedy
this state of affairs.
This enables us to respond to concerns about the need for the dominated to
find a way to bridge the gap between worlds, for it suggests that we need
to revise how we understand this bridging. Instead of ‘politics’ requiring us to
find the most narrow distance between these world views and bridge this gap
via a subject who can most easily be identified with the dominant grouping,
Rancière’s implication is that if we are motivated by a strong enough sense of
equality there is nothing to stop us seeking strategies to bridge the gap at its
widest point – albeit that this is a far more difficult task.77 Thus it is the
moment of subjectivation that is key to the effectivity of politics. He also
emphasises that despite the need for the dominated themselves to be the ones
who stage the equality, others can act in solidarity with those who are seeking
Equality 45
to bring about this staging by finding ways to bring the worlds together for a
moment.78 It is to be expected that the greater the extent to which this gap is
bridged the deeper and more severe the rupture effected and, again in simple terms,
the greater the potential for a ‘more different’ way of ordering the social.79
It becomes evident that even though ‘politics’ cannot exist in its own space,
this does not mean that it cannot have far-reaching effects, as well as lesser,
more modest outcomes. ‘Politics’ can be seen in popular uprisings that stage
‘the manifestation of a still unheard of subject’ but also could refer to ‘the
modest meeting of nine persons creating in a London tavern a “Correspond-
ing Society” open to an unlimited number of members or even a slight mod-
ification of the timetable of a worker’s evening’.80 ‘Politics’ is not defined in
terms of scale. The ways in which it could reconfigure the police order are
endless, and as such there are infinite possibilities for the change it could
effect. This is made much clearer in Rancière’s description of his method as one
of ‘untangling’. For example, in A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques
Rancière Rancière suggests that ‘politics’ is ‘almost everywhere and in every time
interlocked, if not confused, with police. But it is precisely because things are
continuously entangled … that you need criteria to handle the tangle itself ’.81
And previously in Dis-agreement he says that the terms ‘police’ and ‘politics’
may also, and mostly do, designate the very entanglement of both logics.
Politics acts on the police. It acts in the places and with the words that
are common to both, even if it means reshaping those places and changing
the status of those words.82
This analogy of entangling seems to make the relationship clearer. ‘Politics’,

Rancière tells us, is where two opposing logics collide – that of the police
order (inequality) and that of equality.83 The criteria he gives us to look out
for to help us to identify ‘politics’ at its most significant are appropriation of
ways of being, doing and saying that produce alternatives via dis-identification
and subjectivation. ‘Politics’ has no proper content of its own and therefore
we must surmise contra Chambers84 that it can be neither pure nor impure. It
is merely the moment of collision, lack and confusion – the scrambling of
meaning and sense. By untangling the logic of equality a little we can make
the collision greater and amplify the resulting confusion, maximising the
space for alternative solutions. Although Chambers is right to note the para-
doxical nature of the ‘politics’/police relationship,85 we need to clarify that
although we can never unlock the two completely, the logic of equality not
only can but also should, as much as possible, be untangled from police at
any given opportunity.
If we are democrats in the Rancièrian sense we should never accept the
entanglement of the logic of equality in the police, despite knowing that there
is no place where a ‘pure’ politics alternative could reside. Hence the task for
all who wish to stand in solidarity with those who are excluded or margin-
alised (even while still unaware of their voices) is not just to attend to better
46 Equality
police orders, but to counter this tangling wherever we encounter it and to
question any given distribution of bodies and spaces. There are two ways to
do this. First, by preventing the tangles from getting worse by thinking about
how equality gets tangled up and entrenched as inequality in the first place;
and second, by seeking ways of untangling, ways of not only tracing but also
pulling on the separate threads of a knot as Rancière’s work has demon-
strated.86 While we must accept that as we untangle in one area equality will
be tangled back up elsewhere, it is a task we must attend to all the same in

order to counter the entrenchment of any police order. This essential demo-
cratic activity goes unacknowledged in Chambers’ reading. Although he calls
on us to change and improve our police orders87 via ‘cultivation, care and
direction’ of democratic politics88 he does not broach the possibility that our
own preferred police order may still restrict and exclude others who we have
not yet recognised.
When speaking of the objects of ‘politics’ and police as tangled we can
think about a task of untangling. This is not to say that the objects of ‘poli-
tics’ exist prior to our untangling, but that we can untangle objects from the
police in order to do ‘politics’. This is a task that is missed by Badiou and
many other critics. It is not an easy task for we have already seen that any
moment of ‘politics’ soon gets entangled back into police. However, in
response to these concerns I would counter that a careful reading of Ran-
cière’s work enables us to see that he has done much to indicate the first steps
that we should take here. The remainder of this book will seek to tease out
the directions that Rancière gives us and to then bring other thinkers into
conversation with Rancière to enable us to progress a little further along this
twisting path.
The practice of untangling helps us to answer the objection that ‘politics’ is
ineffective. It demonstrates to us that in both the worker tailor and Rosa
Parks examples we see the strategising by a political movement incorporating
both ‘politics’ and police. The relationship between these is further elucidated
by a passage from Rancière’s early text, The Nights of Labour, which elabo-
rates the twisted path of emancipation detailed in the diaries of workers where
emancipation is understood in its original sense of emerging from a minor-
ity.89 This speaks directly to Dean’s aforementioned concern about institutio-
nalised democracy that depends on exclusion. Emancipation is the emergence
from the exclusion that is always masked by institutionalised democracy’s
pretence to include all equally.90 Rancière’s path towards emancipation is
neither a closed circle nor a steady ascent through history. In fact the image
of a path must not be seen in terms of a forward-moving, teleological process
at all.91 In this sense, then, emancipation is simply the snaking path leading
between various configurations of our social order:
The movement here is that of a spiral that, in the very resemblance of the
circles in which the same energy is consumed for the benefit of the enemy,
achieves a real ascent toward a different mode of social existence.92
Equality 47
As we have already seen, differences between police orders incorporate both
small and partial steps within a wider scale of social change as well as the
grand revolutionary changes that bring about a different mode of production,
or vastly reconfigured gender roles:
Because a different society presupposes the production of a different

humanity, not a destructive confrontation between master or the bour-

geois class, because the healing of the ill entails the singular asceticism of
rebellion and its apostolic propagation, the illusion of emancipation is
not a nonrecognition reproducing domination but the twisted path whose
circle comes as close to this reproduction, but with an already crucial
swerve or digression. That the bell no longer makes itself heard or, above all,
heeded, that the master is dispossessed of the sovereignty of his gaze and
is no more than the accountant of social exploitation: these two little
differences cannot be reduced to a trick permitting the productive invest-
ment of rebellious energy. The absence of the master from the time and
space of productive work forms this exploited work into something more;
not just a bargain promising the master a better relation to exchange for
the freedom of the workers’ movements but the formation of a type of
worker belonging to a different history than that of mastery.93
So for Rancière, political change is the moment of subjectivation. Yet despite

recognising the freedoms brought by such changes, Rancière refuses to fall
into utopian thinking. Referring to this emancipation as ‘illusory’ he denotes
just how far ‘politics’ is interlocked with the police: ‘politics’ is enacted by
taking and twisting the objects of police. It cannot introduce anything new
and hence has to perform some form of trickery or illusion within the police
in order to bring into focus that which has always been there but which up
until now has gone unnoticed. However, the emancipation that change brings
can never free us from the necessity of living within some form of social
ordering. The aforementioned untangling can never be wholly complete, for
emancipation can never be total since it is impossible to break free of the
need for ordering in general. However, the important point is that this need
not mean that ‘politics’ cannot be far-reaching in a significant sense but that
its outcome is radically open and can be affected by the practice of appro-
priation and dis-identification with attention to the types of subjectivation
that this provokes.
Thus far this chapter has argued that the claims that Rancière’s ‘politics’ is
impossible to plan, is rare and unavailable, weak and ineffective, were based
on misconceptions that overlooked the way that ‘politics’ and police inter-
relate via appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. They thereby
mistakenly figured ‘politics’ and police as separate and mutually exclusive
rather than everywhere tangled together, and were inattentive to the way that
‘politics’ is the moment that manages to effect extraordinary outcomes from
within the everyday. As a consequence, it is possible to defend Rancière’s
48 Equality
conceptualisation of ‘politics’ for its redirection of our focus towards the
strategy of appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation which together
undermine our conformity with given ways of being, saying and doing
through positing alternative ways of living.
Strategy: from police to ‘politics’

Although we can defend Rancière’s ‘politics’ conceptually, if we take it on

board what would it mean for the way in which we think about the emancipatory
project and democracy today? In this section I seek to consider the implica-
tions of Rancière’s work on ‘politics’ for democratic strategy and the future of
the left. Before we can consider the implications for strategy, we must first
acknowledge that some perceive a tension in Rancière’s work – between on
the one hand his avid disavowal of the guiding role of theory for action, and
on the other the development of his theoretical ‘politics’/police framework
that aims to speak in more detail about what ‘politics’ is. The reason why
Rancière insisted on identifying the structure of ‘politics’ is that he wished to
challenge the quasi-Foucauldian claim that politics arises simply because
there are always relations of power. His concern is that this outlook
obscures the identification of the structure of emancipation. Rancière’s ana-
lysis thus provides tools for ‘politics’. Although the above clarification about
‘politics’ being everywhere entangled with police does lower the stakes of this
tension somewhat it still implies that we can theorise the underlying structures
of the moments of disruption of the hierarchies of order and hence the fear
remains that this overprivileges the role of theory. However, this fear is only
valid if we still subscribe to the false binary between theory and practice
which is simply the product of a division of labour itself.94 Rancière does not
suggest that just because theory can be used to dominate political action95 we
should as a precautionary measure abandon all theory, but simply cautions us
to problematise this division, to be wary of and critique the revered status of
‘theory’, and to be less respectful of theory qua theory. Hence those pre-
viously labelled ‘activists’ and ‘thinkers’ (academics, teachers, intellectuals)
should regard themselves as engaged in a common project to both think and
act in tandem, thereby reconceiving the role of ideas in relation to political
struggle and no longer prioritising the ideas of an ‘intellectual’ over those of
anybody else.96 This does not mean that those who are still seen to be in the
role of the ‘intellectual’ today cannot have ideas, merely that all those who
are committed to the emancipatory project should judge them according to
content rather than as the source of their conception.
This relates to a second distinction between organisation and spontaneity.
In 1974 Rancière commented on the Parti Communiste Français’s post-1968
commitment to the need to oppose ‘the “spontaneous” and “petty-bourgeois”
ideology of the students with the scientific wisdom of the Central Commit-
tee’,97 wishing to manage and direct the workers’ ignorant ‘spontaneity’ with
their organisational party structures. More than thirty years later in the
Equality 49
aforementioned context of the revival of the idea of communism he is still
cautioning us to reject this ‘spontaneity and organisation’ dichotomy in order
to help us to focus more carefully on ‘the distribution of tasks, positions and
powers’ that could accord with emancipation rather than domination.98 One
example of such opposition still at work today can be seen in Dean’s distinc-
tion between her own support for the party form and the anarchist grass-roots
spontaneity of Occupy Wall Street. Instead of Occupy Wall Street’s focus on

autonomy (which she saw as leading to multiple and sometimes contradictory
goals), horizontality (which according to Dean, led to a scepticism about any
organising structures that eventually undermined them) and leaderlessness
(which Dean claims caused paranoia among those who were in leader-like
positions) she claims the need for a party that could bring solidarity, vertical
and diagonal strength, and clear leadership.99 Although she is aware that the
grass-roots activism that led to the evolution of Occupy Wall Street did
involve some forms of immediate organisation and practice100 she still asserts
that the party is needed to ‘organise individuals’ in the longer term into a
collective form101 and to direct and discipline ‘mass spontaneity’.102 Likewise
Žižek calls for a party to provide organisation to the ‘whole of social life’.103
While in an attempt to take up a middle ground Bosteels asserts that ‘the
power of the plebs does not emerge spontaneously’104 and thus calls for a
Badiou-inspired party,105 not for discipline and organisation, but to name
what he refers to as ‘the flexible organization of a fidelity to events’.106 Yet he
thereby continues to employ, even in this weaker form, the spontaneity/
organisation binary rather than problematising it in order to demonstrate the
way that it is used to block ‘politics’ rather than to promote emancipation.
Yet what does it mean to reject this binary? It does not simply mean that
we must embrace both spontaneity and organisation, but that we need to stop
seeing these as representing different methods of doing ‘politics’. Rancière
tells us that although emancipation implies disorder ‘this disorder has nothing
spontaneous about it’, while also noting that ‘organization may simply mean
the spontaneous reproduction of existing forms of social discipline’.107 Hence
when it comes down to the proposal for a party this is not about spontaneity
versus organisation but two different methods of organising. Therefore it
seems to mean that we can neither assume that a party will help us to orga-
nise nor that without a party we will not be organised. This enables us to
recognise that the question of party form is not a question of organisation
versus spontaneity but a question of which type of organisation is more con-
gruent with emancipation: the communist party hierarchy and division of
roles or the equality and horizontality that typically are favoured by the
alterglobalisation movement and anarchists.
In rejecting this debate Rancière is more interested in problematising the
workings of particular instances and form of organisation. Since we have seen
that it is impossible to separate emancipation from domination completely
the important thing here for Rancière is not about how we organise. Organi-
sation is inevitable. However, we need to find ways to accept organisation
50 Equality
while simultaneously keeping a clear conceptual distinction between rupture
and order, which will be present in any form of organising – at grass-roots
level or party-based. This distinction is not communicated by spontaneity
versus organisation figured as a binary but rather emancipation versus dom-
ination figured as overlapping interlinking logics that can more or less be
untangled in places. Before moving on it is worth noting here that if, by party,
we are simply referring to a grouping committed to horizontality and equality

that was focused on organising and planning democratic strategy, it would
seem that this could be congruent with Rancière’s democratic ‘politics’.
Rancière’s commitment to untangling the emancipation that ‘politics’ offers
thus does not simply reject or ignore these oppositions between theory and
practice, organisation and spontaneity; instead he works through them iden-
tifying a need to problematise and overcome the division of labour and to see
the argument about party form as using issues of organisation to mask a
defence of hierarchy. Bearing this in mind, and in light of the recent wave of
occupations around the globe, let us turn to consider the implications of
Rancière’s work for the strategy of occupation.
In the emerging literature on the Occupy movement, many commentators
note the use of strategy, planning and organisation in preparing for and
maintaining the recent wave of occupations.108 Rancière’s thematisation of
‘politics’ as appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation does therefore
seem to have something to offer those considering the most effective strategy
for posing a democratic challenge to our current order. During this era of
occupation it is particularly interesting to consider, albeit briefly, the extent to
which occupation utilises appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation.
As it is only possible to engage in a brief discussion of this issue here I do not
seek to provide a definitive analysis, merely to point in a direction that could
be of interest not merely to ‘theorists’ or ‘activists’ but to anybody interested
in questions of how to challenge police domination today.
Despite the current proliferation of literature on occupation, as yet there
have been few inquiries into how occupation functions to enact democracy.109
In fact Astra Taylor notes an urgent need for greater attention to be given to
knowledge of ‘past movements and effective strategies and tactics’.110 Fur-
thermore, given the history of occupation as a long-standing military tactic,
especially with regard to the history of imperialism it seems especially
important to question what it is that makes the strategy of occupation
democratic.111 In an obvious sense, occupation clearly implies appropriation.
However, we outlined above that appropriation is more likely to effect ‘politics’
when it involves a ‘taking’ that is also a remaking of ways of being, doing and
saying in order to stage the equality of its subjects with everybody else. Hence
it makes sense to highlight that occupation is not necessarily political in the
democratic sense, especially if it is an occupation by an invading military
force, but that instead it would need to demonstrate particular criteria.
This discussion of the implications of ‘politics’ for the strategy of occupa-
tion will thus perform a cursory evaluation of some of the ways in which
Equality 51
occupation does effect ‘politics’ in order to identify questions and areas of
concern for future consideration. First, let us consider what occupation might
be seen to consist of. Used for many years as a tactic of political struggle by
those with few political resources beyond their own bodies, occupation
became popular as a tactic of worker struggles in the late nineteenth century.
It was borrowed for the purposes of democratic citizen protest by the 1960s
civil rights movement which can be said to have more in common with the
recent wave of occupations, since both portray their struggle as one of
democracy and democratic rights rather than a more particular struggle
between workers and bosses at a specific factory or plant location. These
recent occupations appear to share some common features such as the taking
of space (space deemed to have a symbolic meaning) to both disrupt and
subvert its use. The occupation is undertaken by strategic participants and
consists in them refusing to leave or vacate the space when expected or
requested to do so by the authorities.112
So to what extent do these recent occupations enact ‘politics’ in terms of
appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation? It is clear that occupation
will necessarily involve appropriation. More precisely it involves the appro-
priation of space that is, at least in some sense, not considered to be legit-
imate. However, since appropriation is primarily concerned with the taking
and remaking of ways of being, doing and saying, the consideration of which
space should be occupied113 is important only to the extent that it helps to
stage the ways of being, doing and saying in a clearer way than other already
accessible spaces. For example, Rosa Parks’ protest necessarily had to take a
white priority space on the bus in order to demonstrate how she too was
entitled to be in that space; likewise for the Lipp factory workers to take over
factory production themselves they needed to occupy the space where the
machinery and goods were located. The Occupy Homes movement that
emerged from Occupy Wall Street involved appropriation of the particular
space of the homes under threat of foreclosure and eviction.114 In each of
these examples the occupation of a particular space is seen to be practically
necessary in order to stage the equality at issue.
However, it is interesting that in cases of ‘politics’ that challenge the eco-
nomic system the symbolic use of space may be less important. When
Argentine citizens revived barter clubs in 1995 in response to the unstable
economy it was not necessary for them to take over a symbolic space, such as
the stock market or a bank, in order to enact their alternative to the formal
economy, but instead to simply find any space where they could set up market
stalls.115 Nor does space seem to be such an issue with regard to the debt
cancellation scheme ‘Rolling Jubilee’ and its spin-off ‘debt collective’ which
developed out of the Occupy Wall Street open forums.116 By utilising online
space and advertising via social media these institutions have already suc-
ceeded in cancelling millions of dollars of personal debt. They acknowledge
this as a drop in the ocean and more of a symbolic gesture than a revolution,
but seek to inspire debtors to unionise and demonstrate that debt can be
52 Equality
overcome much more cheaply than creditors are prepared to admit.117 In
performing this role they appropriate the behaviour of creditors and brokers
but do not need to be in the same physical space as them to do it. They are
utilising internet space but this is space that they have legitimate access to and
does not involve them occupying the space of those whose actions they are
appropriating.118 Hence it would appear that there is a question to consider
here regarding the importance of the space occupied, since in these examples
appropriation of space in the form of an occupation appears to be a second-
ary consideration that is dependent on the ways in which it can support a
staging of the appropriation of ways of being, saying and doing.119
Furthermore, although occupation is often noted for its ability to dis-
rupt,120 it is the nature of this disruption that is of particular interest when it
comes to ‘politics’. Disruption that shuts down activity is less able to
demonstrate alternative ways of being, doing and saying than disruption that
produces or creates. Interestingly, with reference to Occupy Wall Street, Safri
notes that because the term ‘occupation’ refers not only to the taking or seizing
of property but also one’s category of employment, the practice of occupation
thus etymologically implies both ‘the taking of space’ as well as ‘to do
work’.121 Indeed, she goes on to document some of the work undertaken by
Occupy Wall Street:
the various working committees of OWS: the library which organized

and ran a free book-lending service, the kitchen committee which pro-
duced and distributed up to 4000 meals a day on peak protest days, the
education and empowerment committee which organized and distributed
well-attended lectures and daily free classes … the facilitation com-
mittee which trained people in the art of running meetings, the press
committee which handled the hundreds of reporters and media demands,
the comfort committee that produced and distributed clean laundry and
arranged beds and showers, the structure group that organized the even-
tual spokes council decision-making structure for the entire occupation,
the technology committee that produced the infrastructure for commu-
nication, the janitorial committee charged with clean-up, and dozens of
more committees.122
In this sense, then, the organisation and infrastructure of this type of occu-
pation seeks to challenge the existing provision of goods and services with a
model demonstrating another way in which ‘society can and does organize
partial production and distribution of goods and services outside market
mechanisms.’123 Yet this raises an issue for future consideration since the final
point that Rancière offers us on appropriation is that the most effective
moments of ‘politics’ are those that somehow manage to stage equality pro-
ductively in a potentially permanent fashion. Of course, the practices listed
here do demonstrate an ethos or manner of provision that its participants
believe could and should be made permanent, and some of which have
Equality 53
continued in different sites since the Zuccotti Park eviction; however, it strikes
me that there are questions to be asked here about permanency, organisa-
tional structures and institutionalisation. Some writers regard this wave of
occupations as a demonstration of alternatives that merely trigger debate and
influence others. Conceived in this way, it is not able to effect ‘politics’ as
powerfully as if it was seen to bring into being potentially permanent new
ways that pose a significant challenge to existing ways. This brings into focus
a significant difference between the use of these sites to host general assem-
blies versus the setting up of alterglobalisation-style encampments and service
provision. Holding meetings and assemblies in public spaces makes efficient
use of the infrastructure already in place to subvert the way in which demo-
cratic decision making is currently carried out. However, provision of sanitary
facilities, health care and education in public parks and squares is more
challenging and hence more difficult to stage as a potentially permanent state
of affairs. Hence despite Kohn’s convincing defence of the way that the pro-
vision of basic amenities, food, health care, libraries and sanitation in public
spaces posed a challenge to the dominant order questions clearly remain
about the relationship between space, the focus of the occupation and the
importance of permanency.
The second feature of ‘politics’, dis-identification, is primarily effective
through the reconfiguration of relations that it provokes and the inability of
the police order to denote a place for those taking part. Occupation is thus
political because of the ways it comes about via dis-identification understood
as the refiguring of relations. For example, in factory occupations (particu-
larly where production is continued), we see dis-identification result in a par-
ticularly strong refiguring of social relations posing ‘in a practical manner the
question of who is the boss of the factory, the capitalist or the workers?’124
These workers challenge the very foundations that ordinarily distinguish the
ways of being of masters and of workers. In such an occupation the workers
dis-identify with their role as workers understood as those who sell their
labour to others, and instead take ownership of the means of production and,
in the cases of continued production, of their labour and that which it pro-
duces. To some extent dis-identification will necessarily feature in any occu-
pation whereby the occupiers no longer accept the restrictions usually applied
to a particular space according to their given identity. Put simply, the occu-
piers of Zuccotti Park stopped identifying as law-abiding citizens when they
refused police orders to leave the park.125 This dis-identification was intensi-
fied when they started to engage in activities that were very different from
everyday citizen practice in contemporary democracies, i.e. setting up assem-
blies and providing voluntary health care provision and living facilities. This
saw them challenging expected citizen relations, as they stopped identifying
with the contemporary neoliberal model of citizen as consumer126 and instead
came together to deliberate and provide services for one another.
However, if we recall the features of dis-identification noted above, this dis-
identification needs to break the link between a subject and their expected
54 Equality
role, breaking with the ways of being they are meant to effect in the spaces
they have been allotted such that assigned positions no longer make sense
such that those who dis-identify are left without an easily locatable place. Dis-
identification breaks with given roles in a way that makes it impossible to
place it within the already existing configuration of identities. Now, to what
extent was this the case with these occupations? We can see that the setting up
of deliberative forums and assemblies posed a challenge to the usual roles of

the government to deliberate policy and citizens to vote on it. Furthermore,
the establishment of alternative models of service provision demonstrated that
people themselves can make decisions about how their society should be
organised without the need for managers and expensive consultancy fees. The
demonstrations of the civil rights movement successfully demonstrated that
black citizens had equal capacity to white citizens. If the occupation is to
assert the equal capacity of the 99 per cent to the 1 per cent in a way that
would be difficult to ignore, the most productive issue to focus on strategically
are the ways in which it can demonstrate the capacity of the 99 per cent to
take on and transform the role that the 1 per cent are currently seen to per-
form. In some cases this has worked (for example the ‘Rolling Jubilee’ cam-
paign has established a successful alternative method of debt transfer);
however, there is clearly still a big challenge here with regard to how we can
establish alternatives that are accepted more widely, which brings us back to
the questions of infrastructure and permanency discussed above.
Furthermore, it is important to recall the discussion about the need to resist
attachment to new identities as they are less a part of the ‘politics’ that is
being effected than the initial dis-identification. In this sense, Žižek missed the
mark when he took it upon himself to remind protestors at Zuccotti Park that
they must not fall in love with themselves.127 A democratic approach,
contra Badiou, would surely require that those involved in democratic
struggle avoid falling in love with anything at all. Perhaps Honig’s notion
of passionate ambivalence is salient here as she encourages us to maintain a
committed sense of detachment and ambiguity towards our social structures
in order to always maintain a critical distance from any particular social
configuration.128
Finally, considering occupation vis-à-vis subjectivation brings us back to
the issue of organisation and the role of the party. Subjectivation for Rancière
is the moment when a political subject emerges against the order that usually
disciplines them. It is the moment of saying no, of doing the unexpected, of
disobeying, but as noted above, through productive practice that challenges
the dominant rationality with another. In this sense an occupation or protest
may always involve subjectivation to some extent. However, it is important to
remember that if appropriation is effected through the following of orders
given by leaders then the scope for subjectivation may be dramatically cur-
tailed. Although Dean is concerned that the absence of party leadership
means that the collective will gets fragmented, thereby enabling a neoliberal
individualisation to be the order of the day,129 this does not apply to
Equality 55
democratic ‘politics’ since subjectivation is not about the fragmentation pro-
duced by individualism but instead concerns emerging parts that may well be
collective, asserting their equality not to the rest, as separate distinguishable
parts, but equality with the rest, asserting collectivity over the whole and thereby
rupturing the justification for existing partitions. Consequently, the role of
subjectivation prompts us to identify and seek to protect the extent to which
the democratic emphasis of the recent occupations creates opportunities for

subjectivation that different organisational structures could reduce.
This cursory discussion of the extent to which occupation enacts ‘politics’
in a democratic sense has identified many ways in which the recent occupa-
tions of public parks and squares have effected ‘politics’ through bringing
together appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation. Yet it also indi-
cates that in considering strategy for future occupations it may be productive
to prioritise further consideration of the salience and symbolism of the spaces
occupied, questions of infrastructure and permanency, and the way that
occupation breaks with established identities and supports subjectivation.
Practising dissensus
Despite critics’ concerns this chapter defends Rancière’s ‘politics’. It identifies
within it a conceptual framework that can inform effective strategies to both
inspire and enact alternative visions of equality and solidarity.130 It directs us
further along Rancière’s twisted path, away from the current neoliberal con-
sensus towards a reinvention of politics. This requires us to support the
emancipation of ourselves and others through the development of dissensual
practices that orient us towards equality, challenging our conformity with
common-sense perceptions by loosening our attachment to given ways of
being, saying and doing.
Notes
1 (2007b: 51–52).
2 Politics is ‘the activity that turns on equality as its principle’ Rancière (1999: ix).
3 Rancière (2010d: 168).
4 Rancière (1995a: 65).
5 Rancière (2010d: 168).
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.: 24–25.
8 Rancière (2012d).
9 Rancière (1999: 37).
10 Rancière (2012a).
11 Ibid.
12 Honig (2001, in particular Ch. 4).
13 See, for example, Rancière (1999: 29, 40, 55).
14 Rancière (2009a: 114).
15 Rancière (1999: 12).
56 Equality
16 This assertion of equal status is why Rancière prefers the language of appro-
priation and taking rather than the alternative of making or creating (author’s
conversation with Joe Hoover), for if the oppressed are to overcome their
oppression it is through forcing their oppressors to recognise and accept them as
equals, because there is nowhere beyond social order where they could escape to
in order to create or make something separate. Hence it is only through sub-
verting existing power relations that oppression can be overcome. However, this
is not to say that something new or qualitatively different could not be created
after the moment of ‘politics’, just that this is not the activity of ‘politics’, but is
the activity of policing. This will be returned to later in the chapter.
17 This is elaborated by Aletta Norval in Writing a Name in the Sky (2012).
18 Here I am indebted to Norval (ibid.) for her discussion of dis-identification and
subjectivation in Rancière’s ‘politics’.
19 Rancière (1999: 36).
20 Ibid.: 12.
21 Ibid.: 24–25.
22 Ibid.: 25.
23 This is detailed by Rancière in various texts, e.g. 1994: 93, 1999: 37–39 and
2007a: 563–564.
24 Rancière (2007a: 563).
25 ‘It is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off their labour and
who are denied of political rights’ (Rancière 1999: 37, citing Blanqui).
26 Thanks to Joe Hoover for coining this phrase in his comments about an earlier
version of this chapter.
27 Rancière (2006: 61).
28 Parks and Haskins (1992: 116).
29 Barnes (2009); Koerner (2002).
30 Rancière (1999: 32).
31 See also Disch (1999) and Lloyd (2007) for parallel discussions about Rosa
Park’s protest.
32 It is evident that Rancière would be sceptical about such a project but this does
not mean that it is not a logical development from his project, merely that the
left would need to remember that no social order is free of domination. So, if
they decided to follow this path they would be responsible for any forms of
domination that would ensue. I will return to this in the final section of this
chapter.
33 Emancipation is taken by Rancière in its original sense as ‘the emergence from
the state of minority’ (2009a: 42).
34 Norval (2007: 141); Davis (2010: 92–100); Bosteels (2009: 169–170); Citton
(2009: 139); Dillon (2003: para. 20, n.p.).
35 To complicate matters further Todd May finds inspiration in Rancière’s work
and even uses Rancière’s thematisation of the categories ‘politics’ and ‘police’ to
inform contemporary anarchist thought and radical social movements in his two
most recent books: The Politics of Jacques Rancière (2008) and Contemporary
Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière (2010). Contra
Badiou, Žižek and others, May sees no significant obstacles in using Rancière to
inspire an emancipatory political project that might escape the grips of police
and thus questions whether some form of institutionalisation of Rancièrian
democracy could be conceived (2008: 176–184, 2010: 26–27, 137). Despite my
respect for May’s project it will be argued below that Rancière’s ‘politics’ cannot
be institutionalised in the way that May postulates since any attempt to theorise
‘politics’ could be used to found a new order and hence turn it into police.
Indeed, Rancière says that any statement of equality will always be a ‘one-off
performance’ because the very moment that equality ‘aspires to a place in the
Equality 57
social or state organization’ it will turn into the opposite: in being institutiona-
lised it becomes particular to one dominant party (1999: 34). However, May
questions whether it may be possible to create a space of politics beyond the
dominatory effects of police order (2008: 176) but Rancière has subsequently
emphasised that this is not the way he conceives of the relation between the two
(2011a: 4). Rancière does acknowledge that long-term structures could exist that
will allow and foster the presupposition of equality, but this is still rather differ-
ent from the institutionalisation that May seeks to hold open as a possibility in
both his works (see Rancière et al. 2008). Thanks to Todd May for bringing this
to my attention; cf. May (2008: 176) and (2010: 26) in which he says ‘we do not
want to eliminate that possibility theoretically’. Although I cannot help but
wonder if May and I are seeking to get at the same point when I later make the
claim that we need to retain the concept of ‘pure’ politics even if practically it
could never exist. Thus however much I admire the way that May has sought to
rethink Rancière’s assertion in order to sketch out his vision for anarcho-
democratic politics I do not think that we need to adapt Rancière’s work to
such an extent in order to identify its value for political movements today.
36 Rancière (2009a: 118).
37 Ibid.
38 This point is illustrated by David Graeber’s surprise that Occupy Wall Street
succeeded in occupying Zuccotti Park without being immediately evicted. He
notes the background planning that went into organising the Wall Street protests,
but also how so often in his experience protest attempts such as these are shut
down by the police before they are able to occupy or disrupt anything at all
(2013).
39 Rancière (2008: 1–15).
40 See Rancière (2001: para. 19, n.p.).
41 Rancière (2012a: 45).
42 Rancière and Lie (2006: n.p.).
43 Rancière (1999: 12–13).
44 Ibid.: 13.
45 This should not be understood as ‘rationality’ in Enlightenment terms, but
merely as one’s own way of thinking.
46 Dean (2009a: 34).
47 Laclau (2005: 246).
48 Rancière (1999: 101).
49 Ibid.
50 Rancière (2011a: 4).
51 Rancière (2006: 73).
52 Rancière (1999: 37, italics added).
53 Rancière (1995a: 66).
54 Rancière (2003).
55 Rancière (2012a: 15–16).
56 ‘Initial’ at least in the English-language reception of his work of which Dis-
agreement remains the most widely read. However, this obscures the anti-eventalist
reading encouraged by his earlier papers (now available in 2011e and 2012c) as
well as The Nights of Labour (later republished in English as Proletarian Nights
2012a). See Frank (2015) on this.
57 Rancière (2011a: 6).
58 Ibid.: 8.
59 Ibid.: 4.
60 Woodford (2014).
61 Chambers (2013: 49).
58 Equality
62 In On the Shores of Politics Rancière shows that a community of equals is
impossible, and hence it is positing equality, rather than aiming to achieve it once
and for all, that is of value (2007b: 84).
63 Badiou (2006a: 112–113).
64 Ibid.: 111, italics added.
65 Ibid.: 121; see also Citton (2009: 128) and Hallward (2009: 154 on this point).
66 Tambakaki (2009: 109).
67 See also Dillon (2003: n.p.); Bensaïd (1999: 45–46); Labelle (2001); Žižek (1999,
see especially p. 277).

68 Rancière (2009a: 118).
69 Ibid.
70 Rancière (1999: 32–33).
71 Rancière (2012a: 46).
72 Ibid.: 43.
73 This does not mean that the oppressed must seek inclusion over the chance to
break free from the order that oppresses them, merely that they cannot break
free from the need for social order tout court. Thus they will need to allot
themselves a new part in the new ordering that emerges after ‘politics’.
74 Barnes (2009); Koerner (2002).
75 Rancière (2012a: 82–83).
76 Ibid.: 83.
77 Thus it does not matter how ‘solid’ or embedded the police order is, because
‘politics’ can always be effected by appropriating and dis-identifying to challenge
the given ordering of bodies, spaces and things.
79 It is troubling that this interpretation implies that it is the role of the oppressed
to redeem the order of the oppressor. However, this is not a value judgement,
merely the recognition that in order to become subjects the oppressed need to
emancipate themselves (see below and also Bingham and Biesta 2010: Ch. 2 for a
discussion of Rancière’s peculiar usage of this term), although others can stand
in solidarity with them and create conditions under which it is easier to do this.
It will be argued below that democrats must attend to the conditions under
which emancipation becomes easier rather than seek to emancipate others.
80 Rancière (2009a: 117).
81 Ibid.: 114–123, 118.
82 Rancière (1999: 33).
83 Ibid.: 28, 31, 32.
84 Although he does provide a helpful discussion about various commentators’
approaches to this topic (2013).
85 Where he expresses this as meaning that although ‘politics’ cannot be ‘pure’ it
will somehow remain ‘other’ to the police (2013: 49).
86 Rancière (2009a: 119).
87 Ibid.: 85.
88 Ibid.: 87.
89 Rancière (2009b: 42).
90 Rancière (1999: 6–7).
91 Emphasised by Rancière when he says that ‘the history of politics … is not a
continuous process’ (2011a: 5).
92 Rancière (2012a: 82).
93 Ibid.
94 Rancière describes this debate as an ‘empty discussion’ (2011b: xvi).
95 We continue to see this domination at work in Žižek’s comments that the intel-
lectuals can act as analysts to the people, not to tell them what they want, but to
form the questions to which the people have the answers (2012: 204–205) and in
Equality 59
Dean’s claim that ‘The Leninist party doesn’t know what the people want. It’s a
form of dealing with the split in the people. Their non-knowledge of what they,
as a collectivity desire’ (2012: 242).
96 Rancière is not saying that we should abandon theory but simply that theory
should not become too divorced from practice (1974: 10).
97 Ibid.: 6.
98 Rancière (2010d: 169).
99 Dean (2012: 210–211).
100 Ibid.: 208.

101 Ibid.: 247.
102 Ibid.: 242.
103 Žižek (2013:188).
104 Bosteels (2014: 231).
105 Drawing on a passage from Badiou’s Metapolitics in which he refers to the party
as ‘an unfixable omnipresence’ (2006: 74).
106 Bosteels (2014: 27).
107 Rancière (2010d: 169).
108 Sitrin and Azzellini (2014: see ch.1 in particular in which they outline conceptual
categories of organisation; Graeber (2013); Maeckelbergh (2012: n.p.); Bray
(2013); Castells (2012); and Gitlin (2012).
109 See the sixty-six essays in Byrne (2012); Mitchell et al. (2013); Chomsky (2012);
Mason (2013); Castells (2012); van Gelder and Yes! Magazine (2011); Gunning
and Baron (2013); Malleson (2014); Sitrin and Azzellini (2014); Suliman (2013);
Gamson and Sifrey (2013); Maeckelbergh (2012); Juris (2012); Caren and Gaby
(2011); Berardi (2011); Brown (2011); Connolly (2011); Dean (2011); Grusin
(2011); Harcourt (2012); Hardt and Negri (2011); McKenzie (2011). Notable
exceptions are Kohn (2013) who evaluates the strategy of occupying public
space; Hopkins et al. (2012) who evaluate the strategies adopted by student
occupiers at the University of Newcastle; Sherry (2011) who traces the historical
evolution of worker occupations; Tancons (2014) who focuses on the role of
occupation as carnival; and Safri (2012) who traces the etymology of the term.
However, none of these evaluate principally in terms of democracy; they all
assume that democracy refers to a set of values or decision-making procedures.
110 Taylor et al. (2011: 20).
111 See Suliman (2013) for a discussion about the colonial and exclusionary impact
of occupation as a tactic, given the history of colonial occupation of indigenous
lands, in the Australian context.
112 Graeber (2013); Taylor et al. (2011).
113 See the discussion about whether and where to occupy prior to Occupy Wall
Street recounted by Graeber (2013: 42–46).
114 See http://occupyourhomes.org/.
115 Krauss (2001: n.p.).
116 These citizen forums followed the eviction of the Zuccotti Park occupation. See
http://rollingjubilee.org and http://debtcollective.org for more information.
117 http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/17/occupy-activists-student-debt-cor
inthian-colleges
118 Perhaps the reason for this is that money itself occupies a rather unique space as
both symbolic and material. See Bjerg (2014) for more on this.
119 See Kohn (2013) for a discussion of why despite the irony of occupations often
‘appropriating’ already public spaces, this does still count as occupation because
they were changing the ways in which these spaces were being used.
120 Graeber (2013); Sitrin and Azzellini (2014).
121 Safri (2012: n.p.).
122 Ibid.
60 Equality
123 Safri (2013: n.p.).
124 Trotsky (1999: 30).
125 Sitrin and Azzellini (2014: 154).
126 Brown (2015).
127 Speech made at Zuccotti Park later published in Taylor et al. (2011), but reiterated
in Žižek (2012: 77).
128 Honig (2001).
129 Dean (2012: Ch. 6, see in particular p. 220).
130 Rancière (2009b: 17).

2 Reflexivity
Untangling the revolution
The first step that Horkheimer took in order to bring theory … to a critical
form was the step to a reflexive turn … In reflexive reconstruction the object of
knowledge loses ‘the character of pure factuality’.
(Christoph Menke1)
But there is a third way of proceeding, which seizes the moment in which the
philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming
the declaration … of the arbitrary nature of this order.
Traditionally, the task of thinking the leftist project has been given over to
critical theory, yet unsurprisingly, Rancière appears highly sceptical of the
ability of current critical theory to serve the needs of ‘politics’. Indeed, to the
inattentive reader it could appear that recently he has denounced critical
theory completely, referring to it as part of the intellectual counter-revolution
and suggesting that it employs a suspect mechanism which subverts its pro-
claimed emancipatory aims. Yet in this chapter I wish to assert that while
these claims must not be brushed aside lightly they do not result in the need
to reject critical theory in its entirety. Instead, Rancière’s critical historical
analysis of the development of the critical theory tradition identifies what it is
that has ensnared the emancipatory logic of critical theory and prevented it
from bringing about its desired ends of emancipation. Thus Rancière is not
rejecting critical theory tout court but calling for a revised practice of critical
thinking that enables us to disentangle its potential for emancipation.3 Hence,
in this chapter I draw out the implications of Rancière’s critique for a critical
theoretical practice that does not succumb to what he sees as this counter-
revolutionary tendency. Instead, I wish to think through what it is that he
means when he refers to a ‘genuine “critique of critique”’,4 an ‘aesthetic
practice of philosophy [that] can also be called a method of equality’.5 I argue
that this philosophy requires a practice of reflexivity which helps to ensure
that it will function as ‘a space without boundaries … a space of equality’.6
Such a philosophy will be able to respond to the requirements of emancipa-
tion without becoming too deeply ensnared in dominatory logics. It can help
62 Reflexivity
us to plan and strategise better police orders while simultaneously serving the
emancipatory logic, and offering democratic movements some level of
protection against entrenching themselves too deeply in any police ordering.
I will proceed by first tracing Rancière’s own critique of the academic dis-
cipline of critical theory, to identify more precisely why he thinks that the
critical theory tradition has been hindered in its emancipatory project. This
takes us back to the emergence of the promise of emancipation in the

Enlightenment era before politics had been categorised into left and right. At
this point the leftist project is understood less through its opposition to the
right and more as an open commitment to emancipation and equality. Since
this point, however, Rancière argues that the logic of emancipation has
become entangled with the logic of domination. Hence the task for critical
theory today is to attend to this untangling in all areas of thought. In the
absence of any further work in this direction by Rancière I will turn to the
thought of contemporary Frankfurt School theorist Christoph Menke. I sug-
gest that this can be taken to complement and develop Rancière’s project
since it adds a practice of reflexivity to protect this revised critical thinking
from disciplinary ethics, while also theorising a way to overcome the teleology
and mystification of earlier Frankfurt School critical theory. I will conclude
by identifying reflexivity as a perpetual practice of actively reflecting on and
reconstructing the grounds of the society in which we live, thus dis-orienting
our ways of thinking. This does not counter the traditional left-wing end of
revolution but instead transcends any particular instance of revolution, seeing
revolution as an open-ended and continual project of perpetual revolutionising,
rather than as a one-off momentous and closed event.
The counter-revolutionary charge

Let us begin by trying to understand more precisely why Rancière sees con-
temporary critical theory7 as counter-revolutionary. This claim was made most
stridently in his 2009 lecture Revising Nights of Labour given on the occasion
of the launch of the Hindi translation of The Nights of Labour at the New
Delhi Centre for the Study of Developing Societies8 as well as in the foreword
to the English translation of Althusser’s Lesson.9 In the New Delhi lecture
Rancière supports this claim as part of a wider argument concerning the
dangerous tendency of political philosophy to efface ‘politics.’ Most famously
he makes this argument in The Philosopher and His Poor and in Chapter 4 of
Dis-agreement in which he argues that any attempt to think politics requires
us to reduce it somehow to something regulatable, and hence something that
we can control and contain. As a result he identifies three tendencies in poli-
tical philosophy, each of which actually ends up oppressing ‘politics’ rather
than supporting or enabling it. The first tendency, ‘archipolitics’, is best
exemplified by Plato and seeks to transcend the messy dissensus of ‘politics’
by superimposing a just, well-ordered community on the unruly demos. For
Plato, political philosophy is the task of conceiving of ideal societies in which
Reflexivity 63
disputes no longer exist. Hence Plato’s politics as an ideal transcends and
ignores the struggle that is democratic ‘politics’.
Rancière suggests that Aristotle has provided the archetype of the second
tendency of political philosophy, ‘parapolitics’, which in turn seeks not to
transcend the dissensus that is ‘politics’, but instead seeks to contain it by
giving a space to ‘the people’ in governing institutions. This can be used to
placate the demos and ensure that the elites are able to rule without trouble-
some opposition.10 Thus parapolitics figures political philosophy as the art of
institutional design.
In the modern era parapolitics gives rise to the third tendency, ‘metapo-
litics’. Contrary to archipolitics’ proposal that the struggle of politics must be
suppressed via the art of constructing the ideal society, metapolitics indicates
that there is a radical gap between any contemporary instantiation of society
and the struggle that it masks. Hence, for metapolitics, hidden behind any
social order is the true struggle of politics. As a result, the metapolitical task
of political philosophy is to reveal the social as false and unveil the reality
behind. This either leads to a nihilistic reading whereby philosophers will
reveal to us that since society is simply struggle there is no point acting, or it
leads back to archipolitics through which philosophy aims to construct an
ideal society, free of dissensus, in which all are represented fairly through a
liberal system of rights and freedoms.11 Rancière sees metapolitics at work
across modernist and postmodernist philosophy, predominantly inspired by
Marxist logics.12 As a result he argues that metapolitical logics prevent phi-
losophy from serving emancipatory aims since they suppress and restrict the
emergence of ‘politics’ as equality. Despite Marxism falling out of favour in
the academy, the structure of Marxist critical and revolutionary thinking is
still at play in contemporary (postmodern) critical thought. It has been recy-
cled in such a way as to subvert its original emancipatory aims and instead
operates against these to shore up the current neoliberal structures of order
and domination.13 In his New Delhi lecture Rancière adds greater precision
to this argument. Since it is not yet well known in English-language scholar-
ship, it is helpful to summarise some key points of this argument on Marxism
before we can go on to assess Rancière’s claims about their implications for
critical theory today.
Rancière demonstrates this ‘recycling’ of Marxist metapolitics in relation to
four interrelated Marxist themes of economic and historical necessity, dema-
terialisation of structure, commodification of social relations and ideological
inversion. Beginning with the theories of economic and historical necessity, he
notes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Marxism was
a more dominant political ideology, its liberal opponents had no need for a
logic of necessity. Instead, their position denied that conditions were pre-
determined and claimed that the freedom of the people was based on the
‘free’ exchange of goods in a ‘free’ market. However, following the late
twentieth-century globalisation of world markets and in the face of the retreat
of Marxism the dominant liberal view of freedom has shifted to appropriate
64 Reflexivity
the idea of necessity in its conceptualisation of freedom as the freedom of
citizens to submit to the necessity of the global market.14 It rephrased the
narrative of economic necessity from its Marxist version where it was under-
stood as ‘the necessity of the evolution leading to socialism’ to a neoliberal
rendering as ‘the necessity of the evolution leading to the triumph of this
global market’.15 This is seen in everyday political discourse, where the roll-
back of the welfare state and the increasing attack on living standards and
citizens’ rights are justified in the language of necessity to conform to market
forces and demands. Furthermore, Rancière hears echoes of Marx in the
contemporary condemnation of any attempts at resistance as ‘reactionary’,
backward-looking and fearful of this necessary evolution, suggesting that this
utilises the same logic as Marx’s denunciation of those who fought the devel-
opment of capitalism and thereby prevented it from fulfilling its necessary
historical role. It is crucial to his argument that this reaction is not reserved
for those on the right but instead is often found in left-wing circles too. This is
illustrated by leftist denunciations and failure to support recent strikes and
demonstrations across Europe against financial reforms which claim that
strikers are too short-sighted to realise that their protest is merely an ‘ego-
istical defence of their privileges’.16 Rancière thus concludes that all across
the political spectrum we find consensus regarding the necessity of market
forces and hence the eradication of any political programme of resistance.
In this spirit of resignation Rancière also claims that leftist philosophers
have adapted the Marxist slogan ‘all that is solid melts into air’17 in the
postmodern commitment to the dematerialisation of structure which claims
that everything is becoming more and more immaterial, liquid or ethereal. In
particular, Rancière cites the work of well-known German cultural critic and
popular philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and his theory that modernity is a pro-
cess of anti-gravitation.18 Sloterdijk plays on the double meaning of gravity,
arguing that our overcoming of gravity as a physical force that facilitates
technical advances such as air and space travel is mirrored by our social pro-
gress. Hence we are now apparently also able to overcome the gravity of
social problems suffered by previous generations such as poverty, hardship
and pain.19 He argues that our contemporary affluent society has been
released from these now outdated concerns, but in our ignorance we do not
fully comprehend this and mistakenly still seek to respond to the world in the
old ways.20 Rancière interprets Sloterdijk in relation to the Marxist claim that
bourgeois society seeks to transcend and deny material inequality and suffer-
ing by projecting illusions that the material is not what really matters. Instead
it seeks meaning in illusory ideas and values, thereby allowing suffering to
continue. Marxism sought to reveal the way in which these ideas worked to
distract society from suffering in order to replace these illusory ideas with
consciousness of social reality in the hope that this would motivate the
movement to revolution. In contrast to this Rancière posits that theories such
as Sloterdijk’s aim to show that ‘our conduct … always projects into an illu-
sory solid reality the inverted image of a process of escape’.21 Thus Rancière
Reflexivity 65
accuses Sloterdijk of denouncing the Enlightenment reason of the critical
paradigm merely to reproduce its mechanism, whereby he transforms the
Marxist idea that people are ignorant of reality and deny their own misery
into a new claim that actually the reality that people are ignorant of is that
reality and misery have disappeared. Hence Sloterdijk transforms the Marxist
theme from a ‘desire to ignore what makes us guilty into the desire to ignore
the fact that there is nothing we need feel guilty about’.22 Marxism and
Sloterdijk both share the claim that the people are ignorant and need to be
shown the ‘truth’, despite differing over what that truth may be.
The point here is that, despite Sloterdijk’s unconventional and carefree style
and his quest to critique the cynicism and seriousness of Enlightenment
reason, he has not succeeded in overthrowing modernist critique and instead
still retains the mechanism that seeks to educate people about the way they
should be. In fact, Rancière seems to assert here that Sloterdijk actually
embeds people more deeply in the mire of their oppression than Marxism
ever did. Whereas it is more common to find the critical theory tradition
seeking to trigger guilt or at least regret in its audience by revealing that
people need to realise their compliance in orders of oppression and thereby
appreciate their culpability, Sloterdijk inverts this one more time. He claims
that what one needs to realise is that there is nothing to feel guilty about now,
and instead admonishes people for still feeling this guilt. Thus he enmeshes
people into a dual layer of guilt: the guilt at one’s culpability is replaced by
guilt that one still feels culpable. Despite his ironic and carefree style he takes
us down a melancholic path for, now that there is nothing to feel guilty about
and we are all able just to enjoy our affluent society, ‘all that is solid melts
into air and it remains only to laugh at the ideologues who still believe in the
reality of reality, misery and wars’.23 He consequently closes off any possibility
for change, leaving us incapable of addressing injustice.
At this point, Rancière notes a third recycled Marxist theme – that of the
commodification of social relations. In Marxism, this denotes the way that
social relations are increasingly believed to be subordinate to market needs.
However, Rancière suggests that in contemporary critical theory, this theme
has also been transformed into its opposite, where ordinary people are
denounced as idiots driven by a frantic ever expanding desire for consump-
tion. Such idiots are beyond ‘redemption’ in the sense that they are no longer
perceived to be capable of ever overcoming this desire. Rancière traces this
line of argument in the work of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello who he
interprets as suggesting that people cannot fight the reign of the spectacle, for
even if they may think that they are challenging this they will actually simply
create the conditions for the regeneration of capitalism.24 In particular they
argue that this is what happened in the case of the ‘artistic critique’ that grew
out of the 1960s student protest movement and focused on themes such as
‘authenticity, creativity and autonomy’ instead of more traditional Marxist
social critique. They claim that during the 1973 oil crisis these new forms of
critique began to be absorbed and subverted in the service of neoliberalism
66 Reflexivity
where we suddenly begin to find themes such as flexibility, authenticity, crea-
tivity, innovation and individual initiative.25 However, Rancière claims that
their analysis rests on a false distinction that associates the struggle against
social oppression with the worker identity, and this new emerging artistic
struggle with the 1968 generation – the children of the petite bourgeoisie.26 As
noted in Chapter 1, this distinction is challenged by Rancière’s research into
the worker archives which suggests that social emancipation is at one and the
same time aesthetic emancipation, and thus it makes no sense to seek to
separate the two into separate struggles. In order to be emancipated socially
one needs to break with the given ‘ways of feeling, seeing and saying’ that
specify one’s identity in a capitalist society – i.e. what it means to belong to
the category of worker versus that of the bourgeoisie.27 Such theory therefore
no longer seeks to ‘provide anti-capitalist fighters with new wisdom’ but
instead appears as a form of ‘nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commod-
ity and the spectacle’.28 Yet this is not to say that the thesis of ‘artistic revolt’
cannot supply us with emancipatory radicalism29 but that it is based on a
mistaken premise that emphasises ‘the impossibility of changing the world’
and thus leaves us trapped in melancholia.30
Faced with such a picture on the left we see the development of ‘a new
right-wing frenzy … that reformulates denunciation of the market, the media
and the spectacle as a critique of the ravages of the democratic individual’.31
Curiously, this echoes the Marxist claim that human rights are bourgeois but
are here taken to threaten ‘all the traditional forms of authority that used to
place a limit on the power of the market’ such as schools, religion and the
family.32 Thus the concern emerges that our current democracy is based on a
particular equality: the equality of consumers to obtain commodities. Conse-
quently, the more people are seen to chase after equality the more they help
to bring about the triumph of the market in every sphere. Subsequently, this
can feed the claim that the thirst for egalitarian consumption has not only led
to the dominance of the market in every sphere, but also to ‘the terrorist and
totalitarian destruction of social and human bonds’.33
Consequently, the ‘enemy’ in this discourse appears to be the democratic
individual and thus it is all too easy to accept that under these conditions any
state or economic decision making must be done without consulting those
irresponsible, frantically consuming individuals who got us into this mess in
the first place. Enter the era of technocratic government and exit the demo-
cratic citizen, for it is to be concluded that it is the ordinary citizen figured as
the individual consumer who is found to be responsible for our current world
order, not the capitalists, the corporations or the aggressive governments.
Furthermore, this inverted post-critical critique allows the argument to be
made that the most dangerous democratic consumers are those with the least
money as they are the least able to consume, and those who rebel in any other
way against the empire of exploitation and consumption.34
The fourth and final theme that Rancière claims has been appropriated into
the neoliberal order from Marxism can be identified within the other three. It
Reflexivity 67
is the theory of the mechanism of ideological inversion which claims that
people are unaware that they are exploited because of the way they experience
their life through the workings of ideology, which functions to mask reality
with a constructed vision of the social. In the Althusserian version of this
theory we find the assertion that people are unable to free themselves and
instead rely upon the savants, the scientists trained in the Althusserian school,
to reveal exploitation to them. Rancière’s frustration with the tautology of

this theory, which entraps people in their ignorance for ever, can be seen in
his claim that according to Althusser:
people are exploited and dominated by the system the logic of which they
cannot understand because the logic of the mechanism hides itself in an
inverted image that people are subjected to. The only things that can
reverse this is knowledge of the machine … but logic means they cannot
see this.35
Rancière asserts that this entraps people in ‘a perfect circle’:
People are where they are because they don’t know why they are where
they are, and they don’t know why they are where they are because they
are where they are. In short they can’t because they can’t!36
The worrying conclusion of this is that people can never free themselves and
will always be dependent on the savants who can lead them to knowledge. Even
a revolution that frees them from economic domination cannot free them
from pedagogical domination. At this point Rancière suggests that we can
identify within Marxism the residues of a perpetual mechanism of ideology
that dates right back to the beginnings of Western philosophy in Plato’s claim
that the division of labour between workers and the philosopher kings was
necessary because the workers’ work needs to be done and cannot wait, and
because the workers have ‘the aptitude, the intellectual achievement, that
makes them fit for this occupation and for nothing else’.37 While the first is
simply an empirical claim, the second is ideological and is based on the idea
that workers are not fit for any other role and thus must always remain as
workers. Thus we see behind the mechanism of the inversion of ideology a
much older idea; in the Marxist mechanism of ideological inversion lurks the
prior Platonic division of knowledge: there are those who can and those who
cannot, and those who cannot must depend on those who can.
Thus the postmodern perspective which denounces Marxism as a ‘grand
narrative’ based on what is now commonly recognised to be an untenable
‘truth’ is itself comprised of a mixture of elements of which the Marxist grand
narrative was composed, theories of necessity, dematerialisation of solid
structure, and the commodification of social relations. This in turn has been
shown to propagate two versions of post-critical critique. Either an ‘optimistic
and progressive narrative’ that mixes historical necessity with Smith’s faith in
68 Reflexivity
the ability of economic providence to ensure the evil of human greed to serve
human needs or the ‘pessimistic and reactionary narrative’ that sees our
rampant thirst for equality destroying us in our desperate obsession with
consumption. Of this pessimistic approach, Rancière suggests that the left-
wing position is one of melancholy38 which claims that ‘there is no alternative
to the power of the beast and to admit that we are satisfied by it’, while the
right-wing position is one of frenzy which ‘warns us that the more we try to
break the power of the beast, the more we contribute to its triumph’.39 We are
thereby rendered impotent and passive, and unable to act.
This makes it possible for Rancière to develop a unique analysis of the
reasons behind the contemporary concerns that Western political parties are
becoming increasingly similar and fail to offer alternatives to voters. He demon-
strates why it does not matter which path this contemporary post-critical cri-
tical theory takes since both versions come to the same conclusion about our
incapacity to effect change:
[b]ecause [we either] cannot and must not oppose historical necessity that
will choose good from evil … [or] … because [our] will to change will add
up to the disastrous reign of the democratic individualism leading human
kind towards its self-destruction.40
Consequently, we are left without alternatives other than that of submitting to

the power of the market.
This post-critical critique of both the right and left versions further perpe-
tuates the Platonic division of knowledge, asserting that people cannot act to
effect change themselves because they do not understand the workings of the
machine. Thus Rancière has argued that although the more recent post-
modern turn is commonly accepted to render much of the earlier critical
theory tradition obsolete, this judgement fails to note how, despite rejecting
much of the content of critical theory and despite the rejection of the eman-
cipatory teleology, the most pernicious mechanisms which initially restricted
critical theory’s emancipatory potential are still functioning in the very work
of postmodern thinkers who wish to denounce it. The logic of this mechanism takes
the social world as observed and then seeks to reveal that beneath this world of
appearances lies a solid reality that has been veiled from view. Critical theory
was the method through which we could remove the veil and peer through
into the depths to reveal the truth of social reality that lies beneath. Hence the
logic of this mechanism was one of inversion: it inverted our modes of
description of reality and revealed the truth beneath the lies. For example,
Althusserian critical theory sought to show how our developed life in the
bourgeois state was based on illusion and how the reality of class struggle lay
beneath this illusion, masked from view, and thereby prevented the workers
from realising that they must rise up and lead the revolution. This reserved a
place for the intellectual as a savant or scientist who unlocks the mysteries of
the deep hidden below the surface and educates the ignorant masses.
Reflexivity 69
It appears that the postmodern turn has further ensnared critical theory by
applying another inversion to its logic: while critical theory purported to seek
the truth behind reality, postmodern theories of the spectacle claim that there
is no truth behind social reality.41 Yet both devalue social appearances in that
they think that this world of appearance is hiding something from us, whether
this be truth or its absence. In both critical theory and the more recent
denunciation of the spectacle there is always ‘the question of showing the
spectator what she does not know how to see’;42 aiming to reveal the secret
and prompt shame at not wanting to see the truth.43 Thus contemporary
social theory remains ‘trapped in the logic of the critical tradition’,44 its
emancipatory aims ensnared by the mechanism of inversion.
As a result the ensuing disconnect that prevails on both the right and the
left leaves critics impotently identifying the symptoms of today’s social pro-
blems without being able to effectively identify their cause.45 Although critical
procedures still endure, they have been castrated through their inversion. They
can no longer offer hope and instead wax lyrical on the myriad ill effects of
our current social order. Not only is this critique unable to subvert the
dominant order but it actually works to serve it since it masks the laws of
domination and presents subjects with an inverted reality.46 By distinguishing
between those who have knowledge of society’s workings and those who do
not, it assigns to the knowledgeable ‘the exalted task of bringing their science
to the blind masses’. However, it has been shown that it has a tendency even-
tually to dissolve into a form of resentment ‘which declares the inability of the
masses to take charge of their own destiny’47 and thereby actually propagates
a logic of domination while purporting to struggle against it.
Domination and emancipation in critical theory

So, how did this subversion of critical thinking come about? It would seem
that the critical theoretical project has been doomed from the start and has
always ended up serving the order it sought to critique because since its ear-
liest beginnings the logic of emancipation has been entangled with the logic of
domination. To demonstrate this Rancière works backwards to examine the
situation from which critical theory initially emerged within Marxist theory
where the root of the problem emerges in the way that emancipation is con-
ceptualised in the first place. He notes how right from Marx’s earliest writings
emancipation is figured as liberation from domination, which is presented
as its binary opposite. Furthermore, in this conceptualisation domination is
identified with a ‘process of separation’ and in contrast liberation appears as a
response to this in the form of ‘regaining a lost unity’.48 In Marx’s theory of
capitalist society alienation refers to the loss of a prior unity.49 In response to
this, emancipation understood as liberation from domination aims to restore
this unity and sets about this by seeking ‘knowledge of the total process of that
separation’.50 Rancière’s problem with this is that any attempt by artisans
(such as those documented in The Nights of Labour) who worked to reorder
70 Reflexivity
their contemporary world could not be conceived of as working for emanci-
pation because, according to Marxist theory, we had not yet learnt the
knowledge of this total process by which society had become fragmented, and
hence their work was either ignored or denounced as some sort of illusion or
trickery. This also reveals the influence of Hegelian logic within Marxist
thought, whereby emancipation is put off or deferred as a final stage of the
process of society’s reunification. This conceptualisation of emancipation as

unifying has, for Rancière, created a blind spot that persisted throughout
Marxism and prevented Marxist critical thought from ever achieving its
emancipatory aims, since it led it to reproduce the aforementioned logic of
domination, whereby knowledge is retained by the privileged few, thus
placing everybody else in a relation of subordination.
Yet as shown above, this leads to a cyclical process that is never able to
escape the sphere of domination. It made it possible for emancipation to be
identified with the promise of science which could reveal one’s true capacities
beneath the illusion. Rancière notes that the logic of science was one of
‘endless deferment of the promise’, for all science can do is endlessly ‘generate
its own ignorance’51 by creating its own spheres of reference and its own
model of a real world hidden beneath the false to then work upon. The
Marxist link between liberation and unity, based on the Hegelian logic of
fragmentation synthesised in unity, diverted emancipation away from a focus
on capacities and thus became endlessly deferred. Right from the start,
emancipation has always been entangled with domination within Marxist
thought.
This was not a problem that began with Marxism but can actually be
traced back further. Rancière notes how this tendency to tie emancipation
into the logic of domination dates back to the very moment that a wave of
emancipatory potential burst back onto the political scene via the revolutionary
era. In the counter-revolutionary writings of Edmund Burke we find the
unsurprising conservative concern that the revolution has destroyed all the
traditional institutions of society that were thought to protect individuals
such as religion, family and the monarchy, and after the revolution indivi-
duals without these traditional ties were a dangerous liability. Roaming about
in newfound freedom, released from their traditional social bonds and with-
out social hierarchy to protect them from themselves, these new individuals of
the revolution were ripe for exploitation in the service of violence and terror
as well as capitalism.52 However, Rancière notes, perhaps more surprisingly,
that these conservative concerns were shared by many revolutionary thinkers
and writers who were not quite willing to grant the people the power they had
promised them, and baulking at the last moment, turned tail and began to
shore up the new French Republic against the power of the unruly mob.
Rancière claims that this last-minute fear, already prevalent in revolutionary
thought even in the revolution’s earliest days, ensured the continuing presence
of the logic of domination and hence can be traced from here straight into the
emerging thought of Marx and subsequent Marxist critical thought.
Reflexivity 71
This does not mean that all emancipatory aims are doomed. Instead,
Rancière suggests that where the movement for social emancipation has gone
wrong is that it has misconceptualised emancipation from the start.53 As
noted above, Rancière has argued that emancipation has been twisted away
from its original meaning as the ‘emergence from a state of minority’54 into a
contrasting idea that emancipation is something done to somebody by
another party – the freeing of a slave for example.55 Rancière’s meaning
therefore breaks away from the relation of dominance and asserts emancipa-
tion as something done for oneself. It signifies a break with the ancient link
between one’s occupation and one’s capacities56 and instead posits the
potential existence of beings ‘who are not adapted to any specific occupation;
who employ capacities for feeling and speaking, thinking and acting, that do
not belong to any particular class, but which belong to anyone and every-
one’.57 Although this corresponds with many aims of Marxist and wider
socialist thought his concern is that by conceiving of emancipation within a
Hegelian structure or as the result of an accrual of knowledge it is held captive
as a promise whose moment is endlessly deferred.
If the logic of emancipation and domination is everywhere entangled then
at this point we are left wondering where the impetus comes from to separate
them and why Rancière begins his tale with the French Revolution? It would
seem that he could have gone a step further in his tracing of this tale, but in
the absence of this we can turn to Menke’s short essay Aesthetics of Equality
(2006) to ponder the origins of this story and enable us to identify some more
dramatic implications. In this essay Menke takes us back to the beginning of
the modern age, to the dawning of Enlightenment thought as epitomised in
the opening passage of Descartes’ Discourse on Method: the claim that ‘what
one calls common sense or reason, is naturally equal in all men’.58 This
moment, commonly understood as the birth of the Enlightenment, is thus
characteristically twisted by Rancière to emphasise it as the re-emergence of
the emancipatory logic into the sensible realm. A logic that has been and
always will be ever present but was more prevalent in the democratic age of
ancient Athens, it had subsequently been subdued by generations of Aris-
totelian thought according to which politics was commonly understood to be
that which was concerned with the justification of distinctions between people
based on the empirical unequal distribution of capacities.59 In Aristotle’s
wake it was commonly accepted that those who possess reason could dom-
inate those who lack it leading political philosophy to construct complex
typologies of who possesses reason and in what form. Descartes, playing here
the nuncio of the modern age, in one sentence brushes aside this ‘traditional
political question’ of who possesses reason and redirects it towards a new
question of the method as which one can best ‘exercise one’s reason’.60 To
allow a shift of focus onto the method of exercising reason Descartes simply
supposes that ‘Reason, is by nature equal in all men’.61 Yet in this small step
he released the logic of emancipation, for equality as supposition unlocks
possibility and opens the door to social change. Although this presupposition
72 Reflexivity
that all were equal drove the spirit of the revolution it did not prevail.62 Even
in his famous essay on the Enlightenment Kant cannot quite bring himself to
abandon the logic of incapacity fearing that if the majority of humans do
manage to throw off the yoke of oppression they will not be able to exercise
their reason without practice. He thereby wishes to promote the enacting of a
‘secure course’ of correct reason rather than the pitting of any old reason
against another.63 Thus the battle between the logics of emancipation and
domination had been fought and won before the French Estates General of
1789 established that those in favour of revolution would sit on the left and
those in support of the ancien régime would sit on the right, thereby giving
rise to our common conceptualisation of politics conceived as struggle that
takes place on a continuum between left and right. The spirit of revolution,
driven by the logic of emancipation that declared the equal capacity of
anyone with everyone, had already been thoroughly tangled back up in the
logic of domination. Instead of seeing politics as the struggle between order
and disorder, the spirit of revolution as change and possibility versus the spirit
of domination and stagnation and impossibility, it left us with two sides
arguing over which sort of domination, stagnation and impossibility was
best – which ordering of our society we preferred, rather than nourishing the
forces of possibility that rupture any order. By the time Marxism emerged
with its theorisation of emancipation and revolution the struggle between
emancipation and domination had been so subverted as to result in a false
dichotomy between liberation and domination.64
I need to emphasise here that I do not mean to present the logic of eman-
cipation versus domination as a simple binary for if we are to understand the
logic of emancipation as the logic of Rancièrian ‘politics’ and the logic of
domination as the force of the police order, then we know from the previous
chapter that the logic of emancipation can never be pure. It can never be
completely separate from that of domination. As noted in Chapter 1 there is
no social space in which we can be totally free of order and therefore totally
free of domination, instead the untangling of the logic of domination and
emancipation in this chapter can only ever be partial and will never be com-
plete. This does not mean that it is pointless, for in untangling we create
moments of greater emancipation from which reorderings can be constructed;
merely that it is a task to which we must be continually committed and is
never finished.
Distinguishing domination via the aesthetics of knowledge

Although conceptualised differently, it could be argued that Rancière’s cri-
tique of the Enlightenment tradition simply echoes that already made by
other poststructuralist thinkers. However, it is clear from his critique that the
most common poststructuralist trajectories once again lead us back into
metapolitics and its dominatory logics. This can be seen most clearly by jux-
taposing his work with that of Foucault and Derrida. In tracing the
Reflexivity 73
distinctions between Rancière’s thought and their work we can see how Ran-
cière’s analysis offers greater potential to guard against the dominatory
tendency.
First, let us distinguish Rancière’s conceptualisation of domination from
that of Foucault’s. Foucault outlined his work on domination in two inter-
views shortly before his death, when he situated domination in relation to
power, freedom and liberation. Beginning with liberation, while Rancière

simply avoids this term Foucault has specified a particular objection to it. He
is ‘suspicious of the notion of liberation’ since it implies that something has been
lost that can be recovered,65 that we have a capacity to retrieve a ‘human
nature or base, that as a consequence of certain historical, economic, and
social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned by mechanisms
of repression’, and that somehow this can be overthrown in order to return to
the natural or originary state.66 Here the problem for Foucault is that first, there
is no such originary state that we can know of, and second, it implies that
liberation can be reached in an absolute sense. Instead, he prefers to refer to
‘practices of freedom’ that will always be necessary because it is these practices
that we use to operate within the power relations that structure our lives.
Foucault understands power relations to be widespread and usually oper-
ating everywhere: ‘within families, in pedagogical relationships, political life and
so on’.67 Usually these relations are mobile to some extent yet it is here that
he introduces the concept of domination as an unusual occurrence, saying
that one ‘sometimes encounters situations or states of domination’.68 How-
ever, in Foucault’s reading these are extreme examples when ‘power relations,
instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies
modifying them, remain blocked, frozen’.69 Now usually practices of freedom
are those practices through which we can negotiate power relations and hence
exercise our subjectivity; however, in a state of domination ‘certain practices
of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained
or limited’.70 Foucault does seem happy here to retain the term ‘liberation’ in
response to the successful overthrow of such a state. However, he is keen that
we remember that liberation in this sense is still not a total event that gives
rise to a happy, uninhibited and free human being, instead it can only ever
pave the way for our return to a sphere of flowing power relationships which
must in turn ‘be controlled by practices of freedom’.71 Hence domination is a
rare limit form of our existence.
Interestingly, Foucault goes on to say that power relations operate in three
ways. The first can be found in these rare states of domination; the second
takes place at the opposite end of the spectrum via free-flowing ‘strategic
games between liberties’ which are a ubiquitous feature of human life. These
two ways involve ‘structuring the possible field of action of others’ and can
take various forms. Importantly, however, they do not necessarily mean that
‘power is exercised against the interests of the other’ party, and hence is not
necessarily detrimental for they may not result in ‘the removal of liberty or
options available to individuals’.72 In between these two ways are what he
74 Reflexivity
refers to as ‘techniques of government’ which relates to often implicit rules
and conventions that do not only apply to the public sphere but also to family
life, education and even to informal social interaction, all of which govern our
day-to-day conduct. So for Foucault, when we are not in a state of domina-
tion our shared lives comprise everyday strategic games at local level and
more institutionalised governing more generally. Although we can be liberated
from the state of domination we cannot ever be liberated from the presence of
power relations which structure our existence.73
In this sense, then, power relations are the domain that Rancière refers to
as police order. However, Rancière tells us that beyond ‘politics’ ‘[t]here is
only the order of domination or the disorder of revolt’.74 Domination is at
work in all forms of social order. This is because the social is always in some
sense organised according to an underlying logic or rationale that distributes
bodies in places and justifies distributions of roles and things according to
ways of being, saying and doing. Whereas for Foucault the social is the realm
of power relations but not always of discipline,75 for Rancière, the social
always involves some sort of ordering which take a form similar to Foucault’s
understanding of discipline (the ordering of bodies and ways of being in
space). Thus Rancière’s understanding of the social is far less complex: we
either reject given instances of inequality and pit our reason against the domi-
nant reason in order to effect ‘politics’ via the logic of equality; we accept
the dominant reason and its ensuing inequality and do not challenge our
order which will always necessarily include partition, hierarchy and thus
domination; or we reject current instantiations of inequality according to a
logic of inequality in which we fight against our current order in physical
combat. At this point the order of domination has broken down, but rather
than being challenged by an alternative is in a state of flux whereby we no
longer relate to others as equals but as inferiors, enemies to be overcome and
dominated.
These distinctions are of importance since they result in different ways of
conceptualising our response to domination and emancipation. First, for
Foucault, domination in terms of blocked power relations can be resisted via
liberation but this only takes us back to the field of power relations in which
practices of freedom are our tool against the control of others. It would seem
that for Foucault domination retains a negative sense. In contrast, for Ran-
cière, domination can be more or less severe but is always present, apart from
in the fleeting moments of ‘politics’ that rupture this order but only end in
reordering. This means that for Rancière, domination is always a matter of
degrees rather than simply being negative.76
Furthermore, their frameworks highlight different aspects of the social.
Since for Rancière ‘politics’ is momentary and cannot be guaranteed it is
clearly rather different from Foucault’s ‘practices of freedom’ which he
developed into an ethics of care of the self.77 Such an ethic would fall within
the sphere of policing for Rancière, albeit not necessarily in a negative sense
and perhaps as a practice whereby a ‘better’ police order could be created.
Reflexivity 75
However, since the Foucauldian framework lacks the ability to distinguish
these practices as police we fail to see that they too could have dominatory
effects. In contrast, Rancière’s approach alerts us much more clearly to the fact
that even if ‘practices of freedom’ can exist that may help to lessen the
severity of domination in certain ways, they themselves can fall prey to the
very logics they are designed to undermine.78 This concern for the domination
imposed by any order puts Rancière’s anarchism into sharp focus.

With regard to emancipation, if we understand this to be the equivalent of
liberation, we have already seen that for Foucault this is momentary, return-
ing us to a field in which we have greater subjectivity compared to the pre-
vious state of domination. This seems to accord with Rancière who also does
not view emancipation as freeing us from social ordering in general but
simply as a moment at which the distribution of the social is challenged and
reordered. Despite the apparent similarities here, however, salient distinctions
remain concerning the state in which emancipation occurs and what it entails.
If, for Foucault, emancipation is the moment of liberation from domination
understood as a rare and unusual state then emancipation will also be rare
and unusual and only offer escape from extreme subordination rather than a
chance to reorder the everyday power relations that structure our lives. Fou-
cault conceptualises this via practices of freedom. Although in the form of an
ethos these were suggested above to comprise dominatory elements, as mere
practices this need not be such a concern. However, what Rancière’s analysis
emphasises is that on their own these practices may not be successful. Prac-
tices can create conditions for but need not effect ‘politics’. In contrast, if for
Rancière emancipation occurs during a moment of rupture with our everyday
order it may be frequently called for, and offers the potential to challenge and
reorder everyday distributions of the sensible in a way that can be supported
by, but is separable from, dissensual practices such as Foucault’s practices of
freedom.
In contrast, Derridean poststructuralism leads back to domination via a
different route. Rancière has noted similarities between Derrida’s thought and
his own work with particular respect to their treatment of democracy,
acknowledging overlaps between the way he describes the democratic paradox
and Derrida’s assertion of democracy’s aporetic structure79 whereby democ-
racy as a regime is always less than the equality of the name entails and hence
the distance between the name and its practice can always undermine any
particular instantiation of a democratic regime. However, to maintain the
emancipatory function of Rancière’s thought on democracy it is necessary to
distinguish his conceptualisation of emancipation from the structure of the
Derridean ‘to come’ and critical theory as deconstruction.
First, Derrida seeks to render the gap between the double functions of
equality in terms of democracy-to-come. However, Rancière is anxious that
in practice this move works to erase democracy, since it situates democracy
between the democratic regime which is actually oligarchy and the continually
deferred promise of democracy leaving us without a way of focusing on
76 Reflexivity
democracy in the here and now.80 Derrida’s democracy-to-come hence gives
‘both too much and too little to democracy’ in that first, it fails to note that
democracy in practice ‘is more than a regime’ and second, because democracy
in practice is thus ‘always less than the infinite openness to the Other’.81
In contrast, Rancière argues that ‘there is not one infinite openness to
otherness, but instead many ways of inscribing the part of the other’.82 At
first this may seem a little pernickety since Derrida clearly sees democracy-to-
come opening up a function for democracy to work against itself as the cri-
tique of any instituted regime. However, Rancière’s distinction serves to
highlight that Derrida’s focus on the ‘to come’ structure of democracy diverts
our attention from the moment of subjectivation that is so essential for the
practice of Rancièrian democracy.83 Furthermore, it enables us to pull back
from the endless futurity of the Derridean impulse and focus on the here and
now, on acting ‘in this broken time instead of invoking a messianism’.84
Moreover, the juxtaposition with Derrida brings into focus Rancière’s
aversion to futurity and his rejection of the ethical turn. He elaborates this
rejection via Derrida’s acceptance of sovereignty as ‘the essence of politics’85
in Force of Law onwards, which for Rancière has the effect of removing any
force from the demos, since the demos thus has no specificity, and its political
force is instead only inherited by the people following the overthrow of the
institution of monarchy. This prompts Derrida to identify the notion of poli-
tical subjectivity with that of brotherhood, guided by familial rules and con-
ventions and consequently implies that political power is simply an extension
of familial power.86 For Derrida, the political community involves an
assumption of sameness in some sense: a form of ‘substitutability’ whereby
citizens (male and female) are in equal brotherly relationships with one
another. In contrast, Derrida’s concept of otherness denotes an other who is
outside of citizenship and is never substitutable in the role of brother: the
wholly other. Thus democracy-to-come involves a commitment to one who can
never be ‘one of us’. It is rendered impotent and sterile; a democracy without
a demos and without a relevant people. Instead, Rancière’s ‘aesthetic’ con-
ception of ‘politics’ introduces an ‘as if ’ into the equation that has no place in
the Derridean formula. For Rancière, as we have already seen, the political
force of democracy comes from the ability of the subject to enact its part
within the demos, to act ‘as if it were the demos’.87 Without the ‘as if ’ Der-
rida’s ethical ‘politics’ is empty of the force for change, and for emancipation.
It is simply an unreachable horizon, a melancholic reminder that our current
state is less than it could be.
Yet this is not simply a nihilistic melancholia because it has far more serious
implications. It places Derrida’s critical thinking in a position of irredeemable
mastery over the other. In Rogues Derrida notes that democracy-to-come
‘does indeed translate or call for a militant and interminable political cri-
tique’,88 but swiftly follows this with the claim that the other who is the heart
of this democracy-to-come is seen by the theorist as an ‘object of concern’89
rather than as a subject, who through their own actions ‘affirms the capacity
Reflexivity 77
90
of those who have no capacity’. Hence democracy-to-come permanently
‘others’ and subordinates, thereby applying the logic of domination, rather
than seeking to loosen or break with it.
This leads Rancière to express a general concern about the futurity that
accompanies the ethical turn of deconstruction which distracts us from the
urgent attention to the here and now:
Stepping out of today’s ethical configuration, returning the inventions of

politics and art to their differences entails rejecting the phantasm of their
purity, giving back to these inventions their status as always being
ambiguous, precarious, litigious cuts. This necessarily entails divorcing
them from any theology of time, from any thought of a primordial
trauma or a salvation to come.91
For Rancière, it is only through breaking with Derrida’s messianism and

futurity that we can bring back the possibility of emancipation today.
Yet this is not simply an argument with Derrida, it is part of Rancière’s
wider argument with political philosophy whereby the formation of knowl-
edge into a discipline involves the regulation of its object – in this case ‘poli-
tics’. As politics is a miscount, it is unregulatable, and thus all attempts to pin
it down so that it can be studied end up misrecognising it in some way. This is
not just a problem for political philosophy, it is an epistemological problem
for the way in which we approach knowledge in general: we reduce it in order
to make sense of it. However, this is particularly troublesome with respect to
‘politics’ because it suppresses change in our social structures. To avoid this
reductive drive Rancière argues that we need to appreciate the aesthetic
dimension of knowledge,92 the dimension in which all knowledge is appear-
ance – with no proper truth underlying or behind it. This draws on the Kan-
tian ‘aesthetic experience’ as that which breaks with what we know – an
experience that we cannot make sense of in the existing frameworks of
knowledge. Yet poststructuralist philosophy is fearful of such a notion, sug-
gesting that belief in such a perspective outside of knowledge frameworks is
either an illusion that masks the privilege of the subject (e.g. Bourdieu) or
that it reveals a hidden truth, the radical dependency of the human on the
Other (e.g. Lyotard and Derrida). Consequently, these varied critiques of
Kantian aesthetics all share the metapolitical approach to knowledge that
implies that such an aesthetic experience is not a break with knowledge but
simple ignorance of the knowledge that can explain it away. Each in their
different ways opposes the aesthetic dimension of knowledge with an ethical
dimension that tells us of a way of being that corresponds to any particular
identity or location in an order. Each discipline (e.g. sociology, philosophy,
history, science) may seek to do this in different ways but nonetheless will all
specify an order of knowledge that rejects the possibility of any confusion,
break or rupture. In contrast, Rancière argues that aesthetics is concerned
with the change in the status of the aforementioned ‘as if ’ whereby knowledge
78 Reflexivity
can be doubled: an artisan’s gaze can alight on a view ‘as if ’ he were the
bourgeois master who owned it despite knowing full well that he does not. As
we have seen this moment has the potential to provoke the subjectivation of a
subject capable of escaping from the place to which it has been assigned and
‘intervening in the affairs of a community’.93
Thus any turn to ethics is a turn back to the division of knowledge that
leads to domination. Hence the aforementioned point regarding Foucault’s

turn to ethics is also the distinguishing factor between his and Rancière’s thought
on the Enlightenment. For Foucault, despite the common conception that the
Enlightenment concerned the emergence and promotion of ‘right reason’
which has subsequently been questioned and critiqued, its lasting legacy was
in actual fact the emergence of an ethos of permanent questioning and cri-
tique.94 In contrast to this, we see in the above exposition that Rancière is far
more cautious about any claim that the Enlightenment produced a new and
admirable way of being, and instead remarks on its novelty in the emergence
of the assumption that all were of equal intelligence. This does not necessarily
lead to any attitude or ethos (which again is a claim of policing) about the
way in which we should now behave post-Enlightenment. Instead, Rancière
notes the emergence of the emancipatory logic and its immediate entrapment
once again in forms of ordering, including any particular attitude or ethos.
Here for Rancière we have the popular emergence of a potentially disruptive
logic that consequently is immediately entangled back into our systems of
ordering before it can do too much damage as opposed to Foucault’s render-
ing of the emergence of an attitude of critique and questioning that we should
value in and of itself. For Rancière, the only reason we should value this is if
we are committed to emancipation and equality. Hence it is not the attitude
that is of value, rather the consequences that it can be used to effect.
As a result, this brief juxtaposition of Rancière’s critique of the Enlight-
enment with that of other poststructuralist thinkers helps to distinguish his
analysis and indicate how each of these thinkers lead us back into the logic of
domination. Where, though, does this leave critical theory in even its broadest
sense? Despite pretensions towards emancipation and revolution, Rancière
has argued that any thinking, including critical theory, is deeply mired within
the knowledge tradition and thus, despite any emancipatory aims, has always
ended up serving and promulgating the very order it intended to critique.
Curiously, however, and in spite of these accusations, Rancière does not
appear ready to give up on the critical tradition for he concludes his New
Delhi lecture by handing over to his audience the task of investigating anew the
power ‘inherent in the equality of anyone with everyone’ and into ‘the multi-
plicity of its forms’.95 Furthermore, it is evident from his essay The Mis-
adventures of Critical Thought that he conceptualises this as a task of critical
thinking. Indeed, this title implies that critical theory has taken a wrong turn
away from its original aims, and includes within it a call for a return to cri-
tique as a ‘genuine critique of critique’.96 Yet despite his detailed analysis of
critical theory’s misadventure he has not yet thematised what this genuine
Reflexivity 79
critique of critique might be comprised of, nor has he detailed how any ‘genuine
critique’ might avoid the dominatory logic that he has argued is inherent in any
disciplinary organisation of knowledge. In response to his call, the remainder
of this chapter will seek to sketch out how we might reconfigure an emancipatory
critical theory that avoids the tendencies of archi- or metapolitics.
In order to apply ourselves to this task let us pause a moment at this point
to examine carefully the directions that Rancière gives us. He tells us that this
revised critical theory ‘cannot be a further inversion of its logic’ but must
instead take the form of ‘a re-examination of its concepts and procedures, their
genealogy and the way in which they become intertwined with the logic of social
emancipation’.97 In his call for a genealogy he indicates that we need to turn
right back to the moment when the spirit of revolution emerged onto the
scene at the beginning of the modern age, to patiently sift through the rubble
surveyed by Benjamin’s angel of history, and to untangle the threads of eman-
cipation from the threads of domination. However, it is clear that in this task we
must also remain attentive to ensure that we do not inadvertently add ‘another
twist to the reversals that forever maintain the same machinery’.98 Yet beyond
these few sentences I am curious as to how this new aesthetic practice of
philosophy as ‘genuine critique’ can itself be immune to the disciplinary logics
of all forms of knowledge.
A first step is apparent in Rancière’s suggestion that there are two ways
to counter philosophy’s internal dominatory logic that emerges in its self-
identification as a kind of ‘super-discipline’ above all other disciplines. It could be
challenged by an opposing dominatory logic that sets up another discipline
(such as science) in opposition to it. However, he favours an alternative
approach which would ‘seize the moment in which the philosophical pretention
to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration, in the
egalitarian language of the narrative, of the arbitrary nature of this order’.99 It
seems that this would force philosophy to become aware of itself as a poetic prac-
tice, and thereby enable the creation of a ‘space without boundaries which is also a
space of equality’.100 As a result, it is clear that such a philosophy must reject the
given disciplinary boundaries and hence would be an interdisciplinary practice that
critiques the foundational claims and corresponding ethos of any discipline.
In addition, rather than a secret veiled by the social Rancière simply posits
the world as comprising scenes of dissensus. This is empowering because it
reintroduces the possibility (of change) into the social landscape. It means we
can never say never:
every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a

different regime of perception and signification. To reconfigure the land-
scape of what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of
the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities.101
This reveals the potential of dissensus to emerge at any time and in any place,
such that it is always possible to conceive a way out of domination through
80 Reflexivity
reconfiguration of the order of the sensible; through ‘politics’ understood as
the formation of subjectivities102 via appropriation and dis-identification.
Political action must now focus on what is perceived rather than distracting
itself through concern over what this perception may (or may not) be hiding,
and this means a focus on the conditions for subjectivation in terms of ‘both
the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought and done, and the dis-
tribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the
coordinates of the shared world’.103
Thus we have identified critical theory’s task which is to attend to the
question of which conditions are more or less conducive to such ‘obviousness’
as well as the relation between these and particular ‘distributions’ of the
social. However, this still leaves us unsure about what the practice of critical
thinking might consist of more precisely and how it can avoid being made
sense of as a regular discipline. In the absence of any work by Rancière on
this I wish to investigate whether Rancière’s call for a revised critical theory
can be met by Menke’s rethinking of the Frankfurt School’s tradition of critical
theory as an open-ended practice of reflexive reconstruction.104
Christoph Menke and critical thinking as a practice of reflexivity

Why might Menke be of use to us here? Rancière suggests that critical theory
is not all bad, but that it needs to untangle the logic of domination from that
of emancipation. It needs to be careful of any tendency that leads to a theory
of mystification and hidden truth. In his essay Critical Theory and Tragic
Knowledge Menke critiqued the teleological tendencies of Horkheimer and
Adorno’s critical theory so as to rethink it for today.105 It is suggested here
that he helps us to proceed further in this task of untangling. Furthermore, he
emphasises the central place of reflexivity and interdisciplinarity in the critical
tradition but seeks to untangle this from the tendency towards idealist
mystification.106
In Critical Theory and Tragic Knowledge Menke seeks to resolve internal
tensions within the Frankfurt School’s critical theory project which under-
mine its emancipatory objectives. He proceeds by positing that critical theory
needs to be based on a materialist rather than an idealist conception of social
praxis while also abandoning the idea of a final resolution in either sublation
or reconciliation, respectively. He begins with Horkheimer’s essay Critical
Theory in which critical theory is presented as a practice through which we
can dissolve the apparent necessity of our social world into freedom. For
Horkheimer, critical theory belonged to a hopeful process consisting of ‘the
effective striving for a future condition of things in which whatever man wills
is also necessary and in which the necessity of the object becomes the neces-
sity of a rationally mastered event’.107 Thus critical thinking at this point can
be identified within the aforementioned logic of inversion: the method by
which we are to overcome the supposed necessity of existing conditions, by
unmasking the real of human will in order to create ‘a community of free
Reflexivity 81
persons’. However, a strong Hegelian idealism can be identified, whereby
Horkheimer figures human society as alienated from itself through social
praxis that takes us away from our true natures. He suggests that critical
theory can lead us to an unalienated praxis in the concepts and metaphors of
production as the result of free conscious spontaneity, thereby presenting
reflection in the Hegelian mode as the unification of practice and thought.108
Yet Menke notes that in other places an alternative version is apparent,

whereby reflection is presented as materialist since it can maintain ‘the irre-
ducible tension between concept and object and thus has a critical weapon of
defense against belief in the infinity of mind’.109 Hence this materialism
results in the critical consciousness that praxis can never be totally and finally
attained via reflection. Although Horkheimer forces this back to idealism
maintaining that ‘the materialist truth beyond transcendental subjectivity
should be the idea of a conscious and willed social self-reproduction110 Menke
notes that his conceding to materialism this far entails the consciousness that
‘social praxis cannot be made as a whole because it cannot be known as a
whole’.111 Hence Menke suggests that Horkheimer’s concession to materialism
undermines the idealist version of critical theory.
Menke traces critical theory’s further move towards materialism in Ador-
no’s Negative Dialectics in which Adorno asserts that ‘[t]he materialistically
revealed moments of praxis, which withdraw reflexive acquisition just as
much as planned production, are not, – or indeed not only – hindering, but
rather enabling’.112 As such he refigures the reflexive reconstruction of critical
theory as ‘interpretation, with no endpoint’.113 In this move, critical theory is
understood as a task of reconstruction, a retracing of objects ‘as a hyper-
complex web or … interweaving’.114 This enables a redrawing not in the sense
of ‘(re)producing out of oneself ’ (as in the Hegelian model) but neither is it ‘a
purely passive taking up or listening’ a simple reflecting back of a reality
understood as prior to the subject (as traditional theory does). Instead,
Menke notes that this is ‘a reading that must always be understood as a new
and comprehensive writing’115 in the sense of a reading of the world that is
always a remaking of the world. When thus conceived critical theory recognises
its own implication in the world that it studies. As such reflexive reconstruc-
tion is not just a study of the world but a practice understood as an
intervention in it.
Despite this step, the aforementioned tendency towards idealism is main-
tained in both Horkheimer and Adorno’s work in their respective theories of
sublation and reconciliation.116 These serve to lead both thinkers back to a
final overcoming of the material, a final stage that leaves critical theory open
to the logic of domination and control and it supposes a true knowledge of
the system that can function via a mechanism of inversion. In contrast,
Menke posits our need to acknowledge the tragic insight of contingency in
place of necessity such that critical theory can be salvaged as a task of
attending to human suffering and unhappiness, approaching each instance
with the objective of emancipation, while at the same time acknowledging
82 Reflexivity
that this emancipation will be fragmentary and partial, and cannot emancipate
humanity once and for all.
Although this move may help to overcome this instance of the logic of
domination Menke’s refigured critical theory is still conceived as an academic
practice and thus can still fall prey to the idea that it is ‘the proper way of
thinking’ that designates those who practice it to lead and others to follow. If
we recall Rancière’s comments on capacity and emancipation, as well as his

concern for the ethos that accompanies the disciplinarisation of knowledge it
would seem that his call for genuine critique cannot be about trying to sketch
out a new academic discipline or methodology, for he emphasises the equality
of all and challenges any attempt to divide knowledge. Hence we can assume
that the ‘investigation of this power’ that he calls for is something that would
valuably be practiced by us all in our everyday lives and is not just intended
as an academic exercise but needs to be considered as practicable outside of
the academy. Thus it is not intended as a discipline of knowledge, used to
divide and partition the knowledgeable from the ignorant, but as an everyday
practice of reflecting on power structures around us in order to deepen our
understanding of how they were formed and thereby recognise their con-
tingency and the availability of alternatives.117 Hence if we return to Ran-
cière’s claim that the ‘disconnection between critical procedures and their
purpose strips them of any hope of effectiveness’118 one can extrapolate from
this that in reconnecting critical procedures to the emancipatory purpose that
he outlines by seeking to remove opportunities for tendency towards the logic
of domination, we can bring the hope of effectiveness back in. Thus it
appears that Rancière is holding out the hope that a practice of critical
thinking extracted from the disciplinary tradition of critical theory can over-
come this misunderstanding of emancipation and can both emancipate and
lead to the emancipation of others.
Yet despite extracting critical thought from the critical theory tradition in
this way, we must recall that the tendency towards domination was not Ran-
cière’s only concern, for we opened this chapter with his charge that critical
theory is counter-revolutionary. This is puzzling in that it seems that Rancière
is suggesting that critical theory must at one and the same time be devoid of a
fixed end point while also in service of the revolution. Let us stay with Menke
a little longer as he has taken steps to indicate how we might resolve this
apparent contradiction.
In The Permanance of Revolution Menke informs us that in the early days
of revolution it was widely recognised that revolution was best conceived not
as a one-off event but as an ongoing unfolding or momentum; never totally
fulfilled, its fate is to ‘proceed ever further without end’.119 It was this ongo-
ing momentum that alarmed its conservative opponents who saw this
unstoppable progression as dangerous, while it excited its radical proponents,
who instead saw it as an expression of the sublime. In an aim to rethink
revolution as ongoing rather than as a singular event Menke argues that
Burke’s well-known claim that the revolution is simultaneously monstrous and
Reflexivity 83
tragicomic deserves to be revisited for although this claim intends to com-
municate that any call for revolution should be rejected because it will bring
us instability in either a violent or a farcical form Menke argues that this
single two-part description actually awkwardly comprises two separate and
opposing readings of the revolution. Each of these readings leads us to a
different way of conceptualising revolution.
First, in its monstrous form the revolution progresses in a linear fashion

growing increasingly terrible and disproportionate to its original aims. The
revolution seeks equality, yet since absolute equality can never be realised in
any political configuration, the revolution must always overcome any political
configuration that seeks to represent it and replace it with another, thus
becoming increasingly pervasive and controlling. In doing so it will grow ‘into
a terrible and deformed magnitude and power’ through which it seeks to
establish its absolute and total formulation of equality.120 In contrast, it is
tragicomic because despite seeking equality, it always fails. Every time it tries
to effect a particular instantiation of equality in one sphere it will give rise to
inequality in another. The revolution is hereby perceived to move in a farcical
circular motion, always undermining its own success.
Now, this conservative view of the revolution as both monstrous and tra-
gicomic is countered by the radical view of the revolution as sublime yet
within this we also find the dual monstrous and tragicomic readings since it is
formulated in two opposing ways by French revolutionary Babeuf and Marx.
In Babeuf ’s formulation of the French revolution as the forerunner of another
revolution that is to come121 we see that the task of the first revolution is to
bring about a second, and this will take mankind to a situation of greater
justice than anything it has achieved so far.122 Thus the process of the revo-
lution overcoming itself that was noted above by Burke is understood here to
be driven by the force of necessity. Each previous revolution must eventually
be overcome in quest of the infinite claim of a normatively correct principle
of equality which will continue to elude us, yet drive us forward in pursuit of
an ever greater perfection.
This is theorised by Babeuf through reference to natural law, which means
that he suggests that revolution is a political act which could restore an ori-
ginary equality that humans lost when they left the state of nature.123
Although this conceptualisation is shared by many liberal thinkers, Babeuf
differs in that he suggests that the liberal notion that such equality is limited
to the legal public sphere is a fiction that must be overcome by applying it to
our private lives as well, hence figuring equality as sublime since it is greater
than the liberal conception, and is unlimited and borderless.124 However,
Menke points out that the political consequences of such a utopian vision
mean that the same can only be guaranteed to everyone by presupposing that
‘everybody already wants the same’ for it is rooted in the ancient idea of
democracy in the sense of equality of citizen virtue or striving for virtue
which is manifest in the public good which trumps each individual good.
Here, Rancière’s mechanism of inversion returns in force for Babeuf is thus
84 Reflexivity
able to assume that all citizens must also want the public good and if not they
can be labelled ‘ambitious’ or ‘selfish’ and in need of correction.125 Thus we
see that the consequence of this utopian view is tyranny as exemplified by the
revolutionary terror of 1790s France. Consequently, this sublime reading may
manage to counter the reading of revolution as tragicomic, but it cannot
counter Burke’s claim that revolution is monstrous.
In contrast, despite Rancière’s identification of the mechanism of inversion

in some of Marx’s writings, Menke identifies herein a second formulation of
the sublime demand for equality, the aim of which is not to produce Babeuf ’s
state of perfect equality but instead ‘to overthrow all conditions in which man
is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being’.126 Thus we see that
Marx’s interpretation of the imperative of revolution here is subversive rather
than utopian,127 for although it wishes to overcome the existing order of
legal-political equality it does not establish that the demand for equality that
motivates the revolution is ‘grounded in the desirability of its aim of egali-
tarian relationships’ thereby projecting forward to where we have to go, but
instead ‘traces the revolutionary demand of equality back to a preceding and,
what is more, negatively oriented impulse: the impulse which is directed
against all relationships of debasement and contempt’.128 Whereas the revo-
lutionary demand for equality is fundamental for Babeuf who takes it as the
basis for revolution and thus an end in itself, for Marx it is secondary, since it
is in response to the relationships of debasement, enslavement, neglect and
contempt.
However, Menke has one remaining concern regarding Marx’s formulation
in that Marx assumed that all of these conditions are ‘objectively ascertain-
able’ and can be discovered through the correct theory, while he also narrows
and limits the many ways in which mankind can be subject to these condi-
tions as reducible to class conditions.129 Here Menke argues that freeing
Marx’s theory from these two suppositions helps us to see that the relations of
debasement, enslavement, neglect and contempt that trigger revolution begin
in the experience of individuals and thus are different for all who experience
them. This allows us to liberate the sublime radical discourse from the uto-
pian end we find in Babeuf and instead it reveals to us that revolution ‘is the
place or, better, the time in which everybody’s experiences of debasement,
neglect, enslavement, and contempt are expressed and brought to light’.130
Thus we see here that ‘revolution cannot be defined by its end point’ by a
type of equality it is seeking to bring about, but instead can only be defined
‘by a present that seeks to break with the past’.131 Consequently, in this
reading revolution needs to be defined not by a practice which asserts one
particular realisation of equality (e.g. merely legal, material or civil), but one
which goes beyond this as a practice seeking to realise the prior stage to this,
i.e. ‘the state in which everybody gives voice – once again or for the first
time – to their experiences of debasement, neglect, enslavement, and con-
tempt’.132 This is the starting point from which competing interpretations of
equality can perpetually be instantiated, challenged and reformulated.
Reflexivity 85
What then of the monstrous and tragicomic? Should we not be concerned
that the tragicomic fate or the spectre of terror would still befall an open-
ended revolution? First, with regard to the monstrous, Menke suggests that
the utopian reading of the revolution as sublime cannot hold out against
Burke’s reading of the revolution as monstrous because it incorporates a
totalising impulse that drives revolution towards ‘an ever broader expansion
of equality’.133 In contrast, the subversive reading of revolution is driven not
by an abstract principle of equality but by equality as a response to a parti-

cular instantiation of domination. This provides an internal limit to the
revolutionary aims, since even if one instantiation is overcome, a resulting
experience of domination no doubt will still emerge to prompt a further
reconfiguration of equality.
With regard to the tragicomic figured as the self-undermining of the revo-
lution, the utopian version sees any challenge to the onward march for
equality as a weakness or betrayal that needs to be suppressed and overcome,
and thus it can figure the tragicomic as avoidable and controllable. In con-
trast, the subversive version responds rather differently, in that it recognises
the tragicomic as necessary and indeed constitutive of revolution, and thus
embraces it rather than seeing it as a weakness. This is because the revolution
can be seen to undermine itself in two distinct ways. First, self-undermining
happens to the revolution since in achieving its ends (a certain form of
equality) it realises the injustices perpetrated in its name and realises its
imperfection. This is no bad thing as it limits the injustices it will engender.
Second, it consciously enacts a form of undermining in that it then moves on
to overcome newly emerging injustices. Thus Menke argues that the radical
revolutionaries who follow the utopian reading of revolution run the risk of
leading us to domination and underestimate the extent to which the revolu-
tion can be undermined. Meanwhile, the subversive reading is protected from
revolutionary terror and can tolerate its own limits by accepting its tragicomic
nature, thereby resolving Burke’s concerns.
Menke’s identification of the subversive view of revolution not as a striving
toward (as in Babeuf ’s utopian version) but as a struggle against helps us to
overcome the logic of domination by refiguring revolution as open-ended.
However, rather than filling in unnecessarily what it is a struggle against and
hence limiting its scope as seen in the quote from Marx above, what I want to
take from Menke here is that revolution is simply a struggle against domina-
tion however it appears. It is the transformation of social conditions via an
act of emancipation.
The subversive conceptualisation of revolution can avoid both terror and
farce by relinquishing itself to neither. Instead, it avoids terror by not aiming
for perfection and avoids farce by not surrendering to imperfection, but
always strives to refigure social conditions to avoid domination and by react-
ing to instances of domination as they emerge. Critical thinking can thus
avoid Rancière’s counter-revolutionary charge if it is figured simply as a
86 Reflexivity
reflexive process in service of revolution conceived as such, a practice dedicated
to identifying conditions that contribute to domination.
Indeed, in Politics on the Edges of Liberalism Benjamin Arditi draws
attention to the fact that we think of revolution as a singular event. He makes
a case for us to rethink ‘revolutionary singularity’ as ‘a multiplicity of dis-
continuous sites of enunciation of challenges to the status quo’.134 Any lasting
confusion about the duration of such a multiplicity disappears with the rea-
lisation that ‘revolution is not simply a distant time-shattering event that will
lay the foundations for a future state but primarily a performative designating
the activity of revolutionising through which a revolution has already begun to
happen as we work for it here and now’.135
Reflexivity as dissensual practice

So what might this mean for us today? This chapter has identified that Ran-
cière is calling for a practice of critical thinking that reformulates critical
theory as a practice of reflexivity which in turn serves the logic of eman-
cipation rather than domination. As a practice of untangling, this revised
critical thinking seeks to identify and overcome the mechanism of inversion. I
have suggested that the reflexive reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s cri-
tical thought is of use here but is made available to us through Menke’s
reconceptualisation that separates the practice of open-ended reflexive recon-
struction from the telos of either sublation or reconciliation and replaces this
with a commitment to perpetual revolutionising understood as a commitment
to conditions that are more conducive to the emergence of ‘politics’.136
Approaching knowledge through its aesthetic dimension this practice pro-
motes perpetual disorientation of our ways of thinking to disrupt disciplinary
ethics and boundaries and thereby chart a different course for the thinking of
the emancipatory project.
Notes
1 Menke (2006: 60–61).
2 Rancière (2006d: 10).
3 Thus, contra Toscano’s reading, it is clear that Rancière actually defends rather
than rejects emancipatory movements (Toscano 2011: 230).
4 Rancière (2009b: 45).
5 Rancière (2009c: 19).
6 Ibid.: 17.
7 In particular Rancière singles out the work of Althusser, Barthes, Bourdieu,
Baudrillard and Debord, as well as more recently Bauman and Sloterdijk.
8 16 February 2009.
9 Rancière (2011b: xv).
10 Rancière (1999: 74).
11 Rancière (1999: Ch. 4).
12 Ibid.
Reflexivity 87
13 Although he has made these claims in many texts (see especially Rancière 2004,
1997, 1999, 2006a, 2009b) as part of wider arguments the New Delhi lecture
brings them together on the topic of their relation to critical theory.
15 Ibid.: n.p.
16 Ibid.
17 Marx and Engels (1985: 83).
18 See too Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000) for a different interpretation of where
this might take us.

19 Sloterdijk (2004).
20 Rancière (2009d: n.p.).
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.: 30.
23 Ibid.: 31.
25 Rancière (2009b: 34).
26 Ibid. and also Rancière (2011b: xiv).
27 See Rancière (2012a).
29 Rancière cites the work of Virno (1996) and Holmes (2002).
30 Rancière (2009b: 36).
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.: 38.
33 Ibid.: 38. Milner (2003) and Finkielkraut (2005) suggest that the terrorist attack
on the twin towers, the rioting by youths of mainly north-African origin in Paris
in 2005 and other expressions of resentment or terrorism towards the dominant
liberal order were reactions to (or even punishment for) the reign of mass indi-
vidualism and egotistical consumer freedoms.
34 This first point is made by commentators such as Finkielkraut (2005) on the
aforementioned topic of youth riots in the immigrant settled poorest of Parisian
suburbs, who in his analysis suddenly come to ‘embody the narcissism and ato-
mism of consumer society’ (Rancière 2009d: n.p.). The second point can be seen
by revealing that right and left concur in Boltanski and Chiapello’s aforemen-
tioned argument that the irresponsible rebellion of the 1960s generation facili-
tated the breakdown of society and thereby encouraged the reign of the market
(Rancière 2009d: n.p., citing Boltanski and Chiapello 2007).
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 See, for example, Brown (1999).
39 Rancière (2009b: 40).
40 Ibid.: n.p., italics in the original.
41 See Rancière’s critique of Meckseper in 2009b: 28–29.
42 Ibid.: 29.
43 Ibid.: 29, 30.
44 Ibid.: 31
45 Ibid.: 40.
47 Ibid.
48 Rancière (2009b: 43).
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.: 44.
52 Ibid.: 41.
88 Reflexivity
53 Ibid.: 42.
54 Ibid.
55 See Bingham and Biesta (2010: Ch. 2).
56 Rancière (2009b: 42).
57 Ibid.: 43.
58 Descartes (1968: 27).
59 In Politics Aristotle explains that there are those who need to be dominated
because they are by nature slavish for they do not comprehend reason, whereas
those who do by nature comprehend reason are therefore required to lead, to

decide, to order and thus to dominate. Aristotle puts forward an elaboration of
the aforementioned argument of capacities found also in Plato’s Republic. See
also Rancière’s quotation from Aristotle in the opening lines of Dis-agreement
(1999: vii).
60 Menke (2011: 8, italics in the original).
61 Descartes (1968: 27).
62 Thus, contra Foucault’s analysis that suggests that the Enlightenment attitude
was jeopardised by the growth of disciplinary procedures, Rancière identifies this
one point of contention concerning the assertion or denial of equality.
63 Kant (1996: 59).
64 Rancière (2009b: 43).
65 Foucault (1997c: 282).
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.: 284.
72 Lemke (2002: 53).
73 Foucault (1997c: 292).
74 Rancière (1999: 12).
75 Foucault (1984a: 380.
76 Hence police is a ‘neutral’ term (Rancière 1999: 29) since ‘there is a worse and a
better police’ (Ibid.: 31).
77 See Owen and Woodford (2012).
78 Conversely, this could be said to beg the question of whether Rancière’s frame-
work could gloss the distinction between extreme and less serious states of
domination. However, there is no reason why this would have to be the case
given his assertion that there can be better or worse police orders.
79 Rancière (2010b: 45). See Derrida (2005a and 2005b) in which he figures the
democratic aporia in terms of autoimmunity.
80 Rancière (2010b: 59).
81 Ibid.: 60, italics in the original. See Derrida (1994: 82) and (2005a).
82 Rancière (2010b: 60), italics in the original.
83 Rancière (2010d: 59).
84 Rancière (2010b: 60).
85 Rancière (2009c: 12).
86 Derrida (2005a).
87 Rancière (2009c: 13, italics added).
88 Derrida (2005b: 84).
89 Rancière (2009c: 12, referring to Derrida 2005b: 84).
90 Rancière (2009c: 14).
91 Rancière (2006b: 19).
92 See in particular Rancière (2006d and 2009c).
93 Rancière (2006d: 6).
Reflexivity 89
94 Foucault (1984a).
96 Rancière (2009b.: 45).
97 Rancière (2009c: 46).
98 Ibid.
99 Rancière (2006d: 10).
100 Ibid.
101 Rancière (2009b: 49).
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
104 Despite the convergence of their thought here, it is important to note that in
other areas their work differs significantly, in particular concerning their figuring
of the relationship between politics and equality (see Menke 2006).
105 Menke (1996).
106 There are of course significant differences between Menke’s work and that of
Rancière. For example, Menke (2006) theorises politics as beginning in equality,
but takes a metapolitical approach rather than identifying equality as a mis-
count. However, this does not prevent his work on critical theory and revolution
from being of use to us here.
107 Menke (1996: 57), citing Horkheimer (1972: 230).
108 Menke (1996: 64).
109 Horkheimer (1972: 28).
110 Menke (1996: 64), italics in the original.
111 Ibid.
112 Ibid.: 65.
113 Adorno (1973: 55).
114 Menke (1996: 66).
115 Ibid.
116 See, for example, Horkheimer (1968: 82) and Adorno (1973: 271).
117 In The Use of Distinctions Rancière (2010c) refers to this practice simply as phi-
losophy. However, since he has used the term critical theory elsewhere I have
chosen consistently to use critical theory and then critical thinking for the sake
of clarity.
118 Rancière (2009b: 40).
119 Menke (2006: 154).
120 Menke (1996: 157).
121 Menke (2006: 158).
122 Ibid.
123 Ibid.
124 Ibid.: 160.
125 Ibid.: 162.
126 Ibid: 163, italics in the original.
127 Ibid.
128 Ibid.: 163–164, italics in the original.
129 Ibid.: 164.
130 Ibid.: 165.
131 Ibid.
133 Ibid.: 171–172.
134 Arditi (2008: 104).
136 Not to be confused with the Marxist theory of permanent revolution (Trotsky
2010, derived from Marx and Engels 2003).
3 Aversivity
Provoking the self
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from
another soul.
(Stanley Cavell1)
To know that words are merely words and spectacles merely spectacles, can
help us arrive at a better understanding of how words and images, stories and
performances, can change something of the world we live in.
In Chapter 1 it was claimed that if we wish to use Rancière to inspire a

democratic strategy of appropriation, dis-identification and subjectification we
need to think about how we can conceptualise and reduce the level of con-
formity that maintains police order, fixing any given conception of the social
in place. In attending to this task, this chapter opens with a discussion of the
brief mention of conformity by Rancière in his work. It will note that despite
the centrality of emancipation in his writing and the insistence that we cannot
be emancipated but must emancipate ourselves, he does little to tell us more
precisely how we can do this. Consequently, the remainder of the book will
proceed by engaging his work in conversation with other thinkers (Cavell,
Derrida and Butler) in order first to effect a contrast through which we can
bring his meaning into sharper focus, and second to develop his work via the
formulation of three more dissensual practices. It will be guided in this task
by Rancière’s aforementioned insistence that politics is about challenging
existing ways of being, saying and doing through doubling, by which he
means the imposition of difference on top of that which already exists. In this
chapter it will be suggested that Stanley Cavell’s theory of the double self can
help us to loosen our attachments to ways of being through aversivity. Chap-
ter 4 will focus on how reading Rancière alongside Derrida on literarity and
democracy helps us to identify poeticity as a practice of dis-orienting our
ways of saying. In Chapter 5 it will be argued that by juxtaposing Rancière
with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity we can identify absurdity as a
practice of unsettling our ways of doing.
Aversivity 91
Following the discussion of Rancière’s work on conformity, this chapter will
take up its task by considering whether Cavell’s aversive thinking – the prac-
tice of doubling the self – can be of use to supplement Rancière’s work by
informing a practice of weakening our attachments to ways of being. This
chapter responds to my own previous work as well as that of Aletta Norval
and David Owen on Cavell and Rancière regarding the topic of subjectivation
and ‘soul dawning’.3 We argue that Cavell thematises more fully the moment
of subjectivation that is so crucial for Rancière’s ‘politics’. Indeed, Norval

suggests that the particular feature of Cavell’s work that is of use for this topic
is the attitude of aversion which is theorised in his discussion of Emerson’s
aversive thinking. However, I wish to suggest that the reason why aversion
provides us with a potential bridge between Cavell and Rancière is that it is
here that Cavell theorises the role of the double self in subverting and
reshaping the political community. Cavell’s aversive thinking therefore theo-
rises the moment of subjectivation as detailed in Rancière, but also the re-
identification that follows. For that reason aversive thinking is of value to an
emancipatory project since it contains a theorisation of how we undermine
ways of being. However, on closer examination we will see that it cannot
easily be extracted from Cavell’s wider theory of moral perfectionism under-
stood as a way of life that is engaged in an ateleological project of democratic
responsiveness towards others.4 Despite the loose and fluid conception of
ethos underlying such a way of life it still entangles the practice of aversive
thinking within an archipolitical project of ethical community, albeit one that
is open and revisable. This chapter thus seeks to consider whether we can
extract the practice of aversive thinking from moral perfectionism in order to
use it to supplement democratic subjectivation. In doing so it will identify and
respond to concerns that moral perfectionism is individualistic, introspective
and elitist. It will conclude that aversive thinking posits a dissensual rather
than an individualistic relationship with society, and that by reading Cavell’s
work on exemplars alongside Rancière we can untangle and protect against
the elitism that remains in moral perfectionism by replacing it with a relation
of provocation both within and between selves. Thus for this project I reject
aversive thinking as an ethos and instead extract a dissensual democratic
practice of aversivity to both self and others in the name of equality that
constantly disputes any order of the community from which it emerges and
hence works to loosen our attachments to any given ways of being, consent-
ing to the communities we construct only inasmuch as we dissent from them.
Appropriating emancipation against conformity

Chapter 1 concluded that a priority for the left was to consider the ways in
which ‘politics’ could be more easily effected through the development of
democratic practices that might untangle ‘politics’ from police, encouraging
subjectivation, by challenging social conformity with any particular order of
ways of being, saying and doing. Although Rancière speaks at length about
92 Aversivity
the current drive for consensus that seeks to close down possibilities for ‘pol-
itics’ he does not analyse how this conformity is maintained. He merely
identifies that the main obstacle to the subjectivation of politics is doubt
about one’s own capacity which is to blame for the acceptance of the division
of labour that assigns bodies to allotted places.5 This claim is carefully out-
lined in The Ignorant Schoolmaster which tells the story of French school
teacher Joseph Jacotot’s experiments with unorthodox pedagogical methods.6
While exiled in Flanders in the early nineteenth century, Jacotot took a job
teaching literature at a Flemish university, but was unable to speak Flemish to
his students who were in turn unable to speak French. With the help of a
translator, he managed to teach a course of lectures on the text Telemaque
and at the end of term set an assignment for the Flemish students to complete
in French. The students’ only aid was a bilingual copy of the text. Jacotot was
astonished when the students all managed to submit acceptable papers written
in French. This prompted him to suspect that the common assumption that
students need to be taught by a teacher who already has knowledge and who
in the act of teaching passes his/her knowledge to the students, may be
unfounded. In fact, Jacotot started to suspect that our understanding was in
large part independent from the teacher. Reflecting further on this possibility
he developed a new style of teaching that does not require a knowledgeable
teacher and instead enables a teacher to teach what he or she does not know.
Initially, he designed this as a method to be used by illiterate parents in order
to teach their children to read by using the words of a familiar prayer or
poem, for example, that could be found in an already available book or writ-
ten down on request by a literate person. By pointing to each word and
asking the child to observe what it must be, Jacotot suggested that a parent
who cannot read nevertheless can teach their child to do so.7
Jacotot referred to this method as ‘universal teaching’ in opposition to the
traditional understanding of education whereby the ignorant are taught by
the knowledgeable. In the traditional ‘old master’ relation, knowledge is per-
ceived as something that is transmitted to the student via explanation, and in
the ‘explicative’ order hierarchies exist between those who know and those
who do not. In contrast to the explicative order, universal teaching does not
seek to provide knowledge to the student, rather to create the conditions for
the student to learn on their own. This order has the power to challenge the
hierarchies of the traditional relation by breaking down the unequal status of
teacher and student.
When Jacotot first developed his theory of universal teaching it attracted
much interest. A journal was established by its followers, and Jacotot came to
the attention of the Dutch royal family who appointed him to teach at a
military academy.8 Yet it soon became evident to him that such an education
could not be institutionalised because to do so would require the establish-
ment of some form of order and regulation which would go against the prin-
ciple of radical equality that universal teaching is founded upon. This is not
to say that the proponents of universal teaching are completely opposed to
Aversivity 93
any form of social order, merely that they tolerate order as instrumental
(merely better than disorder), rather than as a good in itself. Rancière sug-
gests that it is not enough for institutions to be founded upon such minimal
respect, for they require much more from us in terms of loyalty and commit-
ment.9 Thus, if any institutionalisation necessarily requires the explicative
order because it cannot tolerate the destabilising notions of universal teach-
ing, such teaching cannot be institutionalised and ‘can only be directed to
individuals, never to societies’.10 Consequently, we see why Jacotot claimed

that universal teaching ‘will not take’, i.e. it will never replace the traditional
hierarchies of knowledge in that it cannot be established in society. However,
he also asserted that ‘it will not perish’ either, ‘because it is the natural
method of the human mind, that of all people who look for their path them-
selves’.11 Thus it retains an unsettling presence that can never be completely
suppressed, and has the ability to overturn and challenge the ordered division
between student and pupil, the giver and the receiver of knowledge.
Yet what is of interest here is that barriers to this new method exist not in
its failure to be instituted but simply in the lack of enactment of the capacity
of all. Hence Rancière refers to the logic of emancipation as a hypothesis of
‘confidence’, and in The Nights of Labour identifies that the moment of ‘pol-
itics’ depends on subjectivation, a moment in which one rejects the identities,
categorisation, and ways of being, saying and doing allotted by the given
order, when one stops accepting the mastery of others and asserts one’s own
equality. Indeed, the consensus system ensures that we do not challenge our
allotted ways, and hence democracy cannot emerge. In direct opposition to
this the remainder of this book seeks to investigate practices that can chal-
lenge our ways of being, saying and doing. This chapter begins this task by
asking how we might undermine our dependence on preordained ways of being.
As noted above, Rancière insists that emancipation cannot be something
that is done for a person by another since this maintains a relationship of
dependence between them. Instead, if emancipation is to happen people need
to emancipate themselves. Initially, this can seem problematic but, as noted in
Chapters 1 and 4, solidarity is possible. Thus, contra some of the critics dis-
cussed in Chapter 1, Rancière is not suggesting that the rest of us should sit
back and wash our hands of social struggle. This is particularly evident from
the story of Jacotot since Rancière notes that the logic of emancipation does
not mean that teachers become unnecessary but that their role is reconfigured.
The relationship between teacher and pupil changes from one of inequality to
one of equality whereby rather than one party leading and emancipating the
other, the teacher can help to create conditions under which pupils can
emancipate themselves but cannot guarantee that emancipation will happen
nor take credit for it when it does. It thereby switches from a situation of
incapacity to one of capacity.12
It is puzzling, however, that in The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière implies
that the barriers to this new method exist not in its failure to be instituted but
in the individuals themselves who refuse to accept that their knowledge is
94 Aversivity
equal to that of others. This path towards acknowledgement of one’s own
intellectual faculties, which Rancière refers to as the path to emancipation
does not appeal to everyone with some people being disinclined to acknowl-
edge their own abilities. Rancière refers to such a disposition as ‘stultification’
and love of ‘routine’.13 In particular he states that
Stultification is not an inveterate superstition; it is fear in the face of lib-

erty. Routine is not ignorance; it is the cowardice and pride of people
who renounce their own power for the unique pleasure of affirming their
neighbour’s incapacity.14
Here he indicates that when people do not emancipate themselves it is

because they prefer to conform to the current view that they are not capable
because they are fearful of the alternative (the responsibility of having to think
for themselves and to be held accountable for doing so). He seems to imply
that to accept the thought of others is less daunting and brings the short-term
benefit of being able to take one’s place in the hierarchy of knowledge, which
enables people to look down on those they deem more ignorant.
This language appears strangely judgemental and despite rejecting the
binary of ignorance and knowledge seems simply to replace it with one of
cowardice versus bravery. Although the above passage continues by clarifying
that its object is the ‘followers of the Old Master and those powerful in the
old mode’15 it appears inconsistent with the rest of Rancière’s work which
focuses on capacity rather than condemnation. Although the style of the text
does make it unclear when Rancière is speaking his own thoughts and when
he is paraphrasing Jacotot16 it remains disconcerting. However, it is suggested
below that since stultification is something that is done to people and hence is
an effect of domination we need to read these comments as drawing our
attention to the structure which depends on people remaining disinclined
towards emancipation, as well as emphasising that thinking for one’s self
cannot be done for you.
In his book On the Shores of Politics the relationship between emancipa-
tion and Rancière’s police/‘politics’ schema begins to emerge more clearly, for
it is here that Rancière defines emancipation as ‘escape from a state of min-
ority’17 and furthermore explicitly links this to the struggle for equality that
we later (in Dis-agreement) come to discover is what constitutes his under-
standing of ‘politics’. Here, he tells us that the moment of ‘politics’ depends
on emancipation: the acknowledgement that one’s own thoughts are equal to
another’s. Furthermore, this is not simply an individualistic exercise for ‘any
individual can always, at any moment, be emancipated and emancipate
someone else’ and the way in which they do this is not to explain but to
announce, for they need to ‘announce to others the practice’ of universal
teaching.18 He thereby acknowledges a role for those that Jacotot refers to as
‘the disciples’ of universal teaching who ‘announce to all individuals … the
way to teach what one doesn’t know on the principle of the equality of
Aversivity 95
19
intelligence’. In a later text on emancipation, The Emancipated Spectator,
Rancière implies that such a disciple ‘does not teach a pupil his knowledge,
but orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what
they have seen and what they think of what they have seen’.20 Thus to create
conditions for the emancipation of others it is necessary to encourage them to
interpret for themselves and to no longer accept the thoughts of others, to
engage in the practice of ‘knowing oneself ’.21 He also clarifies here that the
aforementioned reference to a lack of emancipation as ‘stultification’ refers to

the way that the traditional pedagogical methods entangle students into a
discourse of their own inability rather than this being perpetuated through
laziness or lack of routine.22
Rancière does not engage in further analysis of the conditions which either
support or undermine this teaching, to loosen our conformity with ways of
being, saying and doing that keep any given configuration of police order in
its place. Picking up this thread, the following three chapters look at practices
that may assist us to create conditions for emancipation. They approach this task
along the three axes of being, saying and doing and consider practices that we
could effect to become more attuned to the instances of doubling of our
ordinary ways that may reconfigure social ordering.
Emancipation in Cavell’s aversive thinking

Beginning with ways of being, Rancière has already indicated that the emancipa-
tion of ‘politics’ begins through change in the self:
a struggle for equality can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor
a pressure put upon him, but always simultaneously a proof given to
oneself. This is what ‘emancipation’ means. It means escaping from a minority.
But nobody escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts.23
Importantly, this is not a fixed and isolated notion of the self but a shifting
fluid play ‘with the relation of self to self ’24 which indicates that the self is a
fertile site for the doubling that is key to Rancière’s account of democratic
‘politics’. Given the lack of further work by Rancière on this, I am curious to
consider the extent to which Cavell’s theory of the double self may enhance
our understanding of emancipation.
Such a task may strike the reader as incongruous since Rancière’s pro-
gramme of radical pedagogy and emancipation has emerged from a separate
tradition to that of the Wittgensteinian ethical focus of Cavell’s moral per-
fectionism. Nevertheless, it does not take much to find echoes of Rancière’s
thematisation of subjectivation via knowing your own thoughts in the writings
of Ralph Waldo Emerson that so inspire Cavell.25 Consequently, the next few
pages will trace the emergence of the double self in Cavell’s reading of Emer-
son to consider the extent to which it can be seen to supplement Rancière’s work
on emancipation.
96 Aversivity
The double self emerges in the practice of aversive thinking in Cavell’s
reading of Emerson. Aversive thinking challenges conformity in the sense that
to conform is simply to follow the thoughts of others, whereas to rely on your
own thoughts requires you to reflect upon others’ thoughts, to weigh them up
for yourself.26 Emerson indicates that thinking in this way is achieved by appre-
ciating that the thinking subject is itself in flux: it is continually (re)formed in
response to its thoughts and thus is always working towards a new self cur-
rently ‘unattained yet attainable’.27 This process is never complete, not because
we never reach the higher and next self, but because in reaching it, we will
always see yet another next, still higher self, to reach for. Thus, for Emerson,
aversive thinking is something that must be practiced continually. It requires
constant commitment to what he refers to as the ‘conversion’ and thus
‘transfiguration’ of thought.28 These terms can be read with reference to
Cavell’s earlier writing on Wittgenstein, in whose Investigations Cavell inter-
prets a ‘call … for transfiguration, which one may think of in terms of revo-
lution or conversion’29 invoking the necessity of ‘contesting (rather than
blindly conserving) the culture’s understanding of its true needs’.30 Such
thinking is depicted in Emerson’s work as oppositional or aversive, which
refers to the fact that one’s thinking changes perspective in order to enable us
to see things differently.
Cavell identifies this change of perspective with Wittgenstein’s famous dis-
cussion of the duck-rabbit image through which an observer views one or the
other image (duck or rabbit) in the same drawing without any new lines being
added. A shift in perspective permits this movement from one to the other, yet
crucially only one image can be viewed at any one moment, never both at the
same time, despite the presence of both perspectives within the one drawing.
Cavell emphasises that this means that recognition needs to arise in the viewer
that both images exist within one another contemporaneously.31 So although
the movement from one image to another is subject to will32 that which ‘we
see from each standpoint is not … the opposition is total … one interpreta-
tion eclipses another, annihilates it – until it returns with its own annihilative
power (or weakness)’;33 thus according to him, this change of perspective
requires the aforementioned aversion to conformity in that this removes any
control over where thinking may take someone (over what they want to see).
Furthermore, Cavell’s figuring of aversive thinking as conversion and then
transfiguration demonstrates that this process cannot be a one-off event
whereby it takes an isolated thought from perspective A to perspective B.
Instead, it must be an ongoing practice, in order to stand continually against
conformity. To illustrate this further, it is helpful to reflect a little more upon
the figure of the unattained but attainable self. It is noted above that Emerson
often implies that aversive thinking will lead us towards what it means to
be more human but he does not assert that aversive thinking will ever make
one truly human (in the sense of once and for all), for its ateleological nature
means that we can become more human without a teleological end-point.
Emersonian perfectionism is therefore about one’s relationship to one’s self, or
Aversivity 97
better understood as one’s relationship to one’s selves, for it recognises a dou-
bleness of the self, between the self that we are, in a present moment, and the self
that we can become. These two facets of the self are called the attained and
the ‘unattained yet attainable’ selves by Emerson, whereby the relationship
between the two is understood as a continual ateleological process. It is important
for Emerson that the whole concept of ‘“having” “a” self is a process of moving
to, and from, nexts’.34 This is important if we reflect on Rancière’s claim that
emancipation is what makes you truly human, and that emancipation emerges
in ‘politics’ which is the doubling of ways of being, saying and doing.
Reflecting back on Rancière via Emerson helps us to posit that emancipation
is an ongoing process of trusting your own thoughts, not a mere one-off
instance. Interestingly, such a journey is evoked in Rancière’s aforementioned
understanding of emancipation as a ‘twisted path’35 and draws out the notion
that the next selves form stages on this journey. Indeed, this temporal
dimension to emancipation as lived experience does accord with Rancière’s
suggestion that emancipation concerns following one’s own path36 thereby
also figuring emancipation as a process that unfolds over time.
At first glance, then, this practice of aversive thinking appears to resonate
closely with Rancière’s work on emancipation. Indeed, Norval has already
noted the salience of this conceptualisation of aversion for supplementing
subjectivation in Rancière’s work. However, in tracing Norval’s argument we
can see that more work might be needed if we are to put aversive thinking in
the service of emancipation.
Rather than simply extract the practice of aversive thinking, Norval sug-
gests that Cavell gives us an ‘ethos’ of aversion that helps to address a problem
in Rancière’s work concerning how ‘democratic challenges find a foothold in
existing orders’.37 Although we have already seen that Rancière is troubled by any
turn to ethics in political philosophy, Norval argues that he has nothing to fear
from the aversive ethos. His critique of ethics arises from the etymological root
of ethos as referring to ‘abode’ and the elaboration of any particular ethos as
consequently indicating ‘the way of being which corresponds to this abode, the way
of feeling and thinking which belongs to whoever occupies any given place’.38
In contrast, the ethos of aversion that Norval finds in Cavell’s work is not
specific to a particular place, it simply works to ‘unsettle’ any commitment to
location and thus rather than affirming any way of being instead alerts us to
the ever present need for change. It can therefore be distinguished from the
ethos that concerns Rancière in three ways: first, it conceives ‘of subjectivity
in a manner that avoids a given and pure conception of identity in favour of a
critical subjectification’; second, it facilitates ‘the possibility of opening up
new worlds … it [is] … futural in character’; and third, it conceives ‘of political
community, not in substantive terms, but in terms that are attentive to the
inevitable closures necessarily accompanying any police order’.39
Yet Norval’s formulation leaves us with two problems. First, she fleshes out
the aversive ethos as one of responsiveness. The addition of responsiveness
gives it a positive content which stops it from being simply a break from any
98 Aversivity
locatable way of being.40 Second, her interpretation of the aversive ethos as
futural lays it open once more to Rancière’s critique of Derrida (outlined in
the previous chapter). In contrast, I suggest that we need to examine the
relationship between aversive thinking and Cavell’s wider project of moral
perfectionism in more detail. In doing so we can identify three areas of
Cavell’s thought whereby aversive thinking is entangled in the logic of dom-
ination. By untangling it we can extract aversion not as an ethos of respon-

siveness but as a dissensual democratic practice of ‘aversivity’41 which retains
but develops Norval’s theorisation of aversion as non-locatable.
The three problematic areas are Cavell’s placing aversive thinking within a
wider archipolitical project of moral perfectionism; the central role of perfec-
tion in the practice aversive thinking; and the charge that aversive thinking is
undemocratic. It is only in working through each of these charges that we can
identify which features of aversive thinking can work to support emancipation
and which might hinder it.
Let us begin this argument by considering how far the conceptualisation of
aversive thinking depends upon the archipolitical features of moral perfec-
tionism. We have already seen that for Cavell and Emerson the value of
aversive thinking is its challenge to conformity. Although initially inspired by
a similar concern to that found in Rancière regarding the domination of some
through knowledge of others, Emerson diverges from this into an argument
about a moral order. We can see this in the commencement address delivered
by Emerson entitled ‘The American Scholar’. This is commonly understood
as a call for ‘Man Thinking’ in the traditional sense that these young scholars
need to commit themselves to their studies in order to learn and critique
knowledge from the great masters, as each generation of scholars will surely
do. Yet Cavell points out that as the essay develops it becomes apparent that
Emerson is asking for something quite different: a deeper reflective and critical
thought that emanates from within each individual. Similarly to Jacotot’s
critique of the old Master model of teaching we see that Emerson asks these scho-
lars to refuse to bow to knowledge and instead challenges them – the thinkers
of the new world – to know their own minds and break free from the mental
servitude of old order. For Emerson, it would seem that the figure of the
American Scholar, understood as a truly thinking human being, who does not
accept the authority of another’s thoughts over his own, does not exist any-
where42 and hence this speech reflects Emerson’s disappointment that the new
world of America has not yet produced any new thinking, but is still in thrall
to the philosophy, social mores and hypocrisy of the old world.43 Thus in
accordance with Jacotot’s universal teaching, aversive thinking is figured here
as a way of overcoming conformity with any order of knowledge.
Furthermore, this does not represent a whim for Emerson but is an urgent
call for change motivated by concern about material injustice. This is parti-
cularly clearly exemplified in the essay ‘Fate’ in which he compares the failure
to think for oneself to a form of slavery.44 The context through which he
makes this argument underlines for us just how seriously he takes the danger
Aversivity 99
of conformity, because this essay, written in 1850, only a few months after the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, makes no reference to the actual struggle
against slavery that so strongly defined that era in American politics.45
Knowing the historical context of this silence, this analogy appears crude, and
to many people, reprehensible. Indeed, it is known from other writings that
Emerson, who was no supporter of slavery, was horrified by the fact that Daniel
Webster, a prominent senator, had supported the Act.46 Hence although the
question of his silence on the matter at first seems to hang heavily throughout
the essay Cavell’s interpretation suggests that ‘Fate’ is actually about forcing
the pressing matter of slavery into the wider context of the very real and ser-
ious physical dangers and injustices that can emerge from our social con-
formity. The likening of non-reflective thought to slavery in this context is
therefore not a trite and parasitical claim, but rather when made by a man
who abhors the slave trade, emphasises just how seriously he takes the threat
of conformity. Cavell reads Emerson as noting a type of hypocrisy in the
citizens who condemned Southern slave owners while they themselves con-
tinued to be enslaved to conformity. Emerson suggests that many of the propo-
nents of anti-slavery only supported the movement because it is a popular
sentiment, not because they have thought it through and believe it is the right
thing to do according to their own considerations, that it is right for them.
Illustrating his concern by reference to his contemporary reform movements
which he suggested were being used in place of ‘critical self reflection’47 he
was thereby pointing to the way that these movements represented a banner
under which to locate oneself as a ‘moral’ person, as a person who belonged
to the current ordering of society and thus could use his or her status of
belonging for their own personal advantage, for example, to run for election
for public office. Hence the lack of aversive thinking is about locating one’s
self in one’s order such that one can benefit from it, whereas the activity of
aversive thinking distances oneself from one’s order. This is not to say that
Emerson’s analogy does not seem insensitive and distasteful with regard to
the existence of slavery, merely that it is important to realise that it was
accepted and widely known that Emerson abhorred slavery (and spoke expli-
citly about it on many other occasions).48 Consequently, this context adds to
the rhetorical impact of his argument. The audience, hearing ‘Fate’ for the
first time, would have been expecting it to focus on the anti-slavery cause, yet
instead they were met with accusations of their own complicity in the society
that they now suddenly sought to distance themselves from.
Yet unlike Rancière’s focus on emancipation for democracy, the contra-
diction between the values of the social order and the instance of slavery is
not figured by Emerson in terms of equality, but in terms of morality. Emer-
son argues that if we are to ever overcome material injustices, including but
not limited to the example of slavery, we need to realise that we face a more
deep-seated challenge: to overcome the mental slavery of conformity too.
Emerson indicates that it is only when people are happy to go along
unthinkingly with popular ideals that widespread injustices such as the slavery
100 Aversivity
of the plantations and farms of the Southern States would be tolerated.49 He
uses this essay to demonstrate how a lack of aversive thinking, obvious in
social conformity, ‘makes only a formal, superficial, inauthentic form of
community’.50 Furthermore, he implies in ‘Self-Reliance’ that instead of living
a moral life, truly motivated by one’s own conscience, the radical reformers of
his contemporary era ‘had adapted reform as a kind of accounting procedure,
a moral penance for a life that was fundamentally alienated’.51 He therefore
posits the reform movements as an empty sham; a charade of morality writ

large to hide the immoral, conformist persons hidden behind it. Such reform
can change society, but will maintain the relationship of dependence rather
than prompt subjectivation in the way that Emerson seems to call for.
Interestingly, Cavell suggests here that we should take Emerson’s essay as a
‘parable of the struggle against slavery not as a general metaphor for claiming
human freedom, but as the absolute image of the necessary siding against fate
toward freedom’.52. This is necessary because democracy claims to be a
regime of freedom. It is a logical necessity of demonstrating the contradiction
between democracy’s promise and the lived reality. This is the contradiction
that Rancière has argued is central to ‘politics’. However, Emerson’s method
of demonstrating this contradiction involves him pointing towards a more
moral future order. He uses morality rather than equality as the measure of
this society’s distance from itself. As a consequence he figures the practice of
aversive thinking in the service of an archipolitical conception of democracy
with its associated approved ways of being.
Likewise for Cavell aversive thinking is the central practice of a particular
way of life: ‘moral perfectionism’. This, for Cavell, is the best life, the way we
should live, whereby we seek always to perfect ourselves, without giving up
despite never attaining the ‘final’ end that we aspire to. Thus, for Cavell,
aversive thinking serves an ethos or preferred way of being that is locatable,
albeit loosely, in a particular concept of democracy as order. The extent to
which this makes moral perfectionism an ethos of the type that concerned
Rancière can be seen in a closer reading of two places where this emerges
most clearly: Cavell’s decision to retain the term ‘perfection’ and the discussion
of the role of exemplars for moral perfectionism.
First, Cavell’s work is a defence of the perfectionist strand of thinking that
runs through the work of many thinkers in the Western canon, from Plato to
Kant, and on to (among others) Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and
Kleist.53 Cavell uses perfectionism as a response to the scepticism of modern
philosophy, and its bitter ‘sense of disappointment with the world’.54 He finds
in perfectionism the means for not rejecting the disappointment but for
accepting it without despairing at the world as ‘cursed’.55 One may allow that
it is not perfect but that does not mean we cannot work to make it better.
Perfectionism thereby counters the desire to withdraw that the disillusionment
of scepticism may invoke. Instead, it emphasises our responsibility and com-
mitment to remain within society to work at imperfection rather than to use
scepticism as an excuse to render us passive and silent.
Aversivity 101
Cavell retains the term ‘perfection’ and its inherent implication that the
world may be perfect-able, not to affirm, as other perfectionists before him,
that the telos of perfection is attainable, neither merely to indicate that better
is possible, but that we should always aim for better, thus invoking the need
for constant striving, rather than ever accepting what we have. So, where
Cavell differs from the perfectionist tradition is that he notes that what we
perceive to be best, or perfect, at one point on our perfectionist journey, will

inevitably seem lacking or shabby in some way once we reach it. Hence there
will be many apparent perfections that we pursue but each will fade into
imperfection upon its attainment. Thus moral perfectionism holds perfection
out to us as our life’s aim, accompanied simultaneously by the acknowl-
edgement that ultimate perfection is impossible.56 Such perfectionism is
therefore processual rather than teleological whereby ‘there is no question of
reaching a final state of the soul but of endlessly taking the next step to “an
unattained but attainable self”’.57
This is problematic for two reasons. First, if the linearity between selves is
perceived in any way as a developmental process leading into the future
rather than simply as the passing of time, it seems to come up against the
same critique that Rancière raised about the futurity of the Derridean ‘to
come’ distracting our focus away from the here and now. Hence, if one is
reading Cavell alongside Rancière even this looser notion of ‘perfection’ must
be seen as unnecessary given that it relies upon a conception of a final order
even if this can never be reached. Second, we see that the desire to retain the
term perfection is in response to the philosophical problem of scepticism. This
makes Cavell’s project a response to an individual philosophical concern
whereby democracy is an effect, rather than a project centred on democracy.
This is important since the notion that we could construct a less sceptical
society is arrived at in Cavell through a particular understanding of aversive
thinking not simply as a practice of negation motivated by a commitment to
equality, but motivated by a concrete commitment to an ongoing ideal of
perfection. This figures aversive thinking as a way of being that belongs in a
specific location of a particular conception of a democratic order. However, in
turning now to the third charge that aversive thinking is undemocratic I will
argue that we can extract the practice of aversivity from any notion of a
moral order and a conception of perfection in order to use it as a practice of
loosening our attachments to any given location.
Dissensual community
We can now consider the charge that aversive thinking may be undemocratic
in that it is elitist, individualistic and introverted. This emerges in Rawls’s
critique of Nietzschean perfectionism due to what he sees as Nietzsche’s elitist
call for us to live for the ‘good of the rarest and most valuable specimens’.58
However, Cavell has provided a detailed defence of this passage, arguing that
Nietzsche is simply calling for us to live in a relation of exemplarity to one
102 Aversivity
another whereby we support and demonstrate to each other better ways of
living in accordance with moral perfectionism. He thereby posits that
Nietzsche’s argument can inspire a pluralist and fluid democratic community
in which we live for the good of each different and various position which
could be taken within society.59 Cavell takes Nietzsche’s words to support the
pluralism of democratic culture, thereby challenging Rawls’ interpretation of
this passage as aristocratic and elitist with a claim for Nietzsche as the
defender of democratic diversity.
Furthermore, Cavell interprets a concrete political project in this passage
from Nietzsche whereby he interprets Nietzsche as saying that the first step on
the journey to thinking aversively is for an individual to come to realise that they
are not perfect, hence the notion of being a ‘failed work of nature’. However,
they possess the potential to lessen that failure, first simply by coming to this
realisation, and second, by trying to improve themselves while simultaneously
helping others to do the same. This acknowledgement of the perfectionist life
as a shared endeavour of aversion suggests that Nietzsche cannot be arguing
for an elitism which would separate great individuals from the rest, and
instead indicates that a perfectionist community is one in which all indivi-
duals are involved in shaping their future together. Yet this again links aver-
sive thinking to an ethical perfectionist community60 that although always in
the process of renewing itself replicates the logic of the archipolitical ethical
community that gave Rancière so much concern.
As to whether aversive thinking is individualistic and introspective, Emer-
son notes the need for others and for community in the practice of aversive
thinking to the extent that aversive thinking cannot be practiced in isolation.
This at first becomes apparent when we realise that in speaking of the self
Emerson often refers to his ‘constitution’, whereas Cavell argues that he is
referring ‘simultaneously [to] the condition of his body, his personal health (a
figure for the body or system of his prose), and more particularly his writing
(or amending) of the nation’s constitution’.61 Consequently, Cavell suggests
that when ‘Emerson identifies his writing … as the drafting of the nation’s
constitution’62 and when he says that ‘No law can be sacred to me but that of
my nature’, he is arguing that ‘it is we who are the “law-givers” namely to the
world of conditions and of objects, and to ourselves in the world of the
unconditioned and of freedom’.63 Furthermore, Cavell believes that when
Emerson states that ‘the only right is what is after my constitution’64 he is not
speaking of his own health and well-being, for this conclusion refuses to
acknowledge the complexity of Emerson’s thought exemplified in his state-
ment that ‘we are now “bugs, spawn,” which means simultaneously that we
exist neither as individual human beings nor in human nations’.65 To try and
be one or the other alone is to fail to do justice to one’s whole self; thus we
will never succeed in aversivity if we are too introverted, nor can we attend
merely to our public lives without attending to our own aversive journeys.
Cavell asserts that Emerson is actually using the duality of meaning found in
the term ‘constitution’ to indicate that for the health of our society we must
Aversivity 103
each take charge of our own self-development. An individual is always also a
member of a political community in a way that can never be mutually exclu-
sive due to the fact that when we acknowledge the veracity of our own
thought by thinking aversively each of us is capable of speaking, indeed
required to speak, that which is ‘true for all men’.66 So we speak for ourselves
not as an individual but as one who is representative of others due to already
being one within a community of those who hear and interpret this speech.
Cavell purports that Emerson’s term ‘constitution’ is intended to refer to both
his own ‘make-up and the make-up of the nation he prophecies’.67 Thus it is
due to our work on this ‘constitution’ that Emersonian perfectionism engages
us with the community through aversive thinking.
Consequently, aversive thinking requires not just a relation to the self but
also a particular type of relation to one’s present community. This is not an
insular ethical project because the strategic practice of aversive thinking pre-
vents it from becoming introverted. Each stage in the ongoing process of
aversion is a ‘step that turns us not from bad to good or wrong to right but
from confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability’.68 To
further understand this engagement with the social that aversivity promotes it
is helpful to linger a little longer over the theme of community in Cavell’s
work. In particular, we need to turn to his apparently discomforting claim
that we cannot opt out of our society, even and perhaps especially when we
have a grievance or do not agree with something that has been done in our
name.69 Thus Cavell asserts that we must practice aversive thinking within
rather than outside of our communities. We have at one and the same time
the need to be active members of our society – active in our dissent – due to
our concern for society’s future, which we critique and seek to change. Hence
we show our consent to our community through our dissent from it which
demonstrates our unavoidable interrelation with it.
Such a practice seems to evoke the idea of an agonistic relation commonly
found in the work of thinkers such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig and
Chantal Mouffe.70 Yet where Cavell differs from Mouffe is that he does not
identify baseline values that are needed within the community (liberty and
equality), for the contestation of what constitutes community goes all the way
down. Furthermore, Cavell goes beyond the agonism of Connolly or Honig in
his attention to subjectivation in the practice of aversive thinking,71 the theo-
risation of how an individual is tied to his/her community; his appreciation of
the role of the arts within this; and the need for an exemplar relation. Instead,
the emphasis Cavell places on aversion to community strikes me as being
particularly evocative of Rancière’s work on ‘politics’ in that it goes against
consensus.72 This leads me to figure Cavell’s work as dissensual rather than
agonistic.73
Furthermore, despite what we may expect after the above passage on con-
sent to community, Cavell draws on Milton’s tract on marriage to argue that
the state has no interest in forcing an individual to remain in an unhappy
relation as it will bring unhappiness to this individual who will then make ‘the
104 Aversivity
commonwealth suffer in terms very like those in which he himself suffers’.74
For Milton, unhappiness in marriage is ‘a bondage to “a mute and spiritless
mate”’; the effect of this on society is ‘a “heaviness” and … without redress from
it the life of its members cannot be “spiritful and orderly”’ and is therefore
taken to be ‘dispirited and disorderly, or anarchic’.75 Thus for Milton, society
needs to seek an end to this unhappiness and so it is
as if the commonwealth were [itself] entitled to a divorce from such a

member since from a commonwealth divorce would mean exile, and since
mere unhappiness is hardly grounds for exiling someone, the common-
wealth is entitled to grant the individual divorce, hoping thereby at any
rate to divorce itself from this individual’s unhappiness.76
This is of political significance, for here Milton is suggesting that in order to

avoid overreacting to the unhappiness of a citizen it may be better for the
future of a society to allow dissenters to remain within our community rather
than seeking to exile them. Cavell’s use of this argument draws a curious
analogy between marriage and political relations today, namely that in the
same way divorce cannot mean total separation, and nor can political dis-
satisfaction – instead we need an acknowledgement that we can be together in
our separateness – our futures (our fates) are always interlinked, whether we
are in agreement or disagreement. Just because spouses or citizens disagree this
does not mean that they are no longer in a relationship, just that the nature of
that relationship has changed. For a divorced couple there can never be a
complete break from the other person whom they will still have feelings for
some way or another (good, bad or neutral – in the marriage relationship
between them or the negation of that relationship, there is still a link between
them that cannot be erased – i.e. they have a history). In any society in which
citizens do not agree it would make no sense immediately to assert that there
is no longer any society, just that the relationship is not harmonious and can
even be antagonistic.
Furthermore, particularly pertinent to our investigation of Cavell in rela-
tion to Rancière is the above claim that to allow for this middle ground in a
relationship, that is neither a being together nor being totally apart from one
another (still in conversation as Cavell might say), we avoid concerns that this
may descend into chaos via the assertion of ‘spiritful’ order. This use of the
word spiritful implies not just accepting social order over disorder in the sense
of siding against Rancière’s ‘politics’ in favour of police, but asserting a cer-
tain relation with order; a police order in which we consent to dissent,
whereby we commit to thinking against the society in which we find our-
selves. Interestingly, this invokes a looser and less embedded relation towards
social order than that of an embedded, conformist and oppressive police.
However, an element of ethos remains in the claim that ‘a certain happiness’
or perhaps acceptance of our common fates ‘a certain spirited and orderly
participation’ is seen here to be owed to the community even though this is
Aversivity 105
understood in a loose sense as simply the others among whom we live (the
commonwealth). From this Cavell figures ‘that if the covenant of marriage is
a miniature of the covenant of the commonwealth, then one may be said to
owe the commonwealth participation’77 in the sense of the deep and continual
engagement and critique of society that Cavell takes a conversation to require.
In response to this concern, we can note that the requirement for ‘happi-
ness’ is unnecessary. Indeed, despite the use of Milton to argue that we can
(and perhaps should) remain together in disagreement, Rancière would insist
that we do remain together in disagreement, whether or not we want to or
think that we should. Without this requirement of happiness we can see this
as a claim that we need to accept disagreement, since in trying to iron it out
we dominate more strongly (through the drive to consensus). This enables us
to focus more clearly on the peculiar way in which Cavell figures community,
whereby our relations are never fixed and thus each person’s whole life can be
figured as a claim to community, one that is constructed from moment to
moment and hence invokes a conceptualisation of community as ever shifting
in meaning and content.78 Furthermore, his understanding of the marriage
relation as analogous for political community implies a certain unlimitedness
of community. In the same way that Rancière’s parts-that-have-no-part
emerge suddenly from within the social order, even though before that
moment they were not seen,79 Cavell’s appreciation of the unfoundedness of
community envisages the excluded Other as already within the community to
enable exclusion to be rendered meaningful. His emphasis on conversation
understood as shared lives together, as the marker of community, invokes
Rancière’s aforementioned argument that the weakness of any police order
is that all positions within it need to be able to communicate, even if this is
simply in order for one party to give orders and the other to receive them.
Hence if Cavell’s conceptualisation of community is simply those who commu-
nicate together – at the level of allotting and being allotted positions that they
may disagree about – then community is the term for the ever shifting terrain
of politics, the space in which human animals constitute and reconstitute the
logos. This means that the subjects who practice aversive thinking are in what
we may deem to be a rather peculiar situation vis-à-vis ‘community’. They see
themselves as within a community at the same time as they dissent from it.
Such a relation dramatically refigures our understanding of democratic com-
munity as fluid and in a constant process of construction that takes us far
beyond both liberal, and even poststructuralist agonistic, conceptions.
Exemplars of dissent
Although we have overcome the concern of introspection within the relation
of exemplarity, our ability to do so seems to depend upon a certain arrogance
at the level of the subject that enables the election of oneself to speak for
others. We have already seen that in Cavell’s response to Rawls’ charge of
elitism he initially turns to Nietzsche to argue that perfectionism is actually
106 Aversivity
about working towards a more egalitarian pluralist and fluid democratic moral
community. However, if we work back one further step to the passage from
Emerson’s American Scholar which is said to have inspired Nietzsche’s work
on exemplarity we find that there is no requirement for an underlying ethos to
work towards. Emerson writes:
in a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two

approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the
hero or the poet their own green and crude being – ripened; yes, and are
content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature.80
Cavell points out that in this passage Emerson does not say that contentment
with being less than a hero ‘is the best or necessary state of things’ but merely
that many seem content with that state of affairs.81 He proposes that the
concerns about elitism can be resolved here since in what follows we see that
Emerson suggests that the cause of this problem lies in the fact that human-
kind is not alive, but merely ‘sleepwalking’ in our conformity with society,
and that we need to ‘wake’ in order to ‘leap’ to the true good whereby we
would come to see that ‘[e]ach philosopher, each bard, each actor has only
done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself ’.82 According
to Cavell, this emphasises that ‘the intuition of a higher or further self ’ is not
a contemporaneous relation of two persons of different value, but is ‘to be
arrived at’ by one and the same person who in saying ‘that the great have
been his delegates’ also ‘declares that “I” can one day … be that delegate’.83
Thus Cavell concludes that each individual foreruns themselves, or their
future possible self, as ‘a sign’ or ‘an exemplar’,84 and so it is evident that one
cannot only be an exemplar to others, but that each self can act as an exem-
plar to itself. Furthermore, this need not be a normative injunction, but can
be interpreted as a practice of aversivity to others and oneself, a relation of
questioning and distancing that enables us to loosen our attachments to any
given identity. Consequently, representation can here be understood to refer
not to one subject representing the interests of another but to Rancière’s sta-
ging of universal equality, whereby a human demonstrates that they are as
human as the next – that they too possess the logos.
Indeed, Cavell suggests that this passage demonstrates Emerson’s aspiration
to the human whereby in understanding thinking as returning to previously
rejected thoughts we are aspiring to becoming what Emerson implies is more
human, in that increasingly we will think for ourselves, rather than accept
what others think. This invokes Rancière’s aforementioned reading of Aris-
totle but in so doing indicates that this is not a processual project of becoming
increasingly human but simply an ongoing process of having to demonstrate
one’s humanity (possession of logos). Indeed, when we remove the direction-
ality and temporality from Cavell’s double self we can instead rethink this as
an undirected back and forth relation of play between selves, between the
selves of the subject and between subjects.
Aversivity 107
However, Cavell’s argument against elitism in the exemplar relation is per-
haps undermined by his recurrent claim that Emersonian perfectionism
‘underlies the moral outlook of the genres of film’ he has studied. In parti-
cular, he focuses his analysis on the Hollywood remarriage comedies of the
1930s and 1940s85 which refers to films such as The Lady Eve, It Happened
One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday,
Adam’s Rib and The Awful Truth. Although Cavell’s writing on film is illu-
minating and endlessly inspiring, his claim that these films are useful for our
understanding of exemplarity is rather troubling, since in his various discus-
sions of the films he is inconsistent in his portrayal of the precise role they
play in the practice of aversive thinking. Given the space Cavell dedicates to
film in his work, it is helpful to reflect further on this question to enable us to
assess the extent to which this discredits the value of the exemplar relation for
democratic emancipation.
Cavell wishes to use the Hollywood remarriage comedies to ‘manifest’
moral issues to us,86 and suggests that they may have something to say to
us about the society in which they were created.87 As such it seems fair to
say that for Cavell, at least at times, these films exemplify a particular
instance of the practice of perfectionism. Indeed, Cavell’s frequent discussion
of the films consists of him using them to demonstrate or illustrate elements
of the perfectionist life to his reader.88 However, many objections have been
raised with regard to Cavell’s use of these films to manifest the perfectionist
relation to us. The films each end with the withdrawal from society by the
central pair who, in nearly all cases, are wealthy and well-protected from
the effects of economic hardship – particularly prevalent during the
Depression era whence they emanated. Added to this is the concern that the
friend/exemplar relationship is just too bourgeois and as such is not equally
available to all. This stems from the way it seems to envisage, at its more
familiar level, those with plenty of time, relaxing over lunch or dinner, dis-
cussing with friends how one might better one’s life. It seems fair to assume
that aversive thinking would be much less burdensome for the better off
with their increased leisure time and lack of financial concerns. In addi-
tion, the portrayal of women is often sexist89 and shallow, with the lead
female roles in many ways depicted as dependent on and inferior to the male
partner. This is compounded by claims that in many ways these films are
racist in their portrayal of non-white Americans.90 Furthermore, there is
concern that the characters in the films do not give us clear exemplars, or
whether this potential is often overlooked, instead feeding into a shallow
cult of celebrity.91 In addition, the marriage relation, especially as por-
trayed in these films, can appear far too intimate a relationship to use as
analogous to democratic relations. Finally, we could ask whether cultural
limits are imposed on these films in the sense that they may only be able to
prompt conversation in their own culture, and when exported to another set-
ting could perhaps lose the ability to promote deep exemplarity and instead
become mere representations to be imitated.92
108 Aversivity
Consequently, it is surprising that Cavell claims that these films can
‘instruct’ us,93 since upon reflection of these issues one cannot help asking if
there may be another genre of films that could better manifest the features of
perfectionism to us? Yet in answer to our question Cavell explicitly claims
that it is this genre of film that is particularly good at manifesting perfec-
tionism to us, arguing that in his work he seeks to draw on these films, refer-
ring to them as examples of ‘good film’. This undoubtedly leaves us a little
wary of the availability of the value of exemplarity for aversive thinking as it

appears that Cavell’s dogged commitment to these Hollywood films, that
glamorise the lives of an elitist and exclusive class, could undermine his
argument that such exemplarity is fit for a democratic, rather than an elitist,
project.
Cavell is aware of his critics and has in various texts sought to defend his
choice in the light of these concerns. In some of his essays he offers an inter-
pretation of why it is that the central couple finish each film by stepping
outside of their society;94 why it is not problematic that they are rich and
privileged;95 why we can defend these films against the claims that they
represent sexist or racist discourses;96 and how, despite all of these issues,
these films can still be exemplary in offering provocation for our democratic
lives. However, in all of his interpretations, Cavell fails to distinguish that the
way in which we relate to and understand these films depends on how we
view our own role vis-à-vis the exemplar relation. Although in his aforemen-
tioned discussion of the exemplar in Emerson and Nietzsche Cavell argues
that the exemplar role is one of provoking the self to develop, not to merely
be imitated, in his defence of these films he fails to note this essential point
and instead slides into a defence of the use of these films as role models to be
imitated.97
Indeed, all of the aforementioned concerns arise due to the assumption, by
Cavell as well as his readers, that these films exemplify perfectionism in the
sense that they are to be copied or imitated in some way; that they portray an
exemplary way of life. Yet when we examine more carefully Cavell’s claim in
Pursuits of Happiness that the films ‘instruct’ us he elucidates a few pages
later that one way in which he understands this instruction is that these films
are as worthy a topic of study as are philosophical texts in that they can
‘teach us how to consider’ them in the same way that we may look to texts
such as Kant’s Critique of Judgement to do this.98 Therefore it seems here that
Cavell is not seeking to use the films as examples of how we should live but
instead to provoke our thought. Indeed, such a relation is made explicit by
Emerson’s Divinity School Address: ‘Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but
provocation, that I can receive from another soul’.99 However, Cavell does not
consistently make this distinction clear leaving us unsure how to relate to the
films that form such an important part of his work.
Thus we see that Cavell’s use of these films is not necessarily to suggest that
we should imitate them, or even that there is anything about them worthy of
imitation. Instead, he values them for their ability to provoke. Yet even if we
Aversivity 109
accept this interpretation we are still left with unease regarding why these
films. Cavell’s insistence that this genre of films (alongside one or two other
chosen genres he has drawn on in other texts) are especially exemplary in
some way leads us to wonder if access to them could be limited by our tastes
and preferences, and also whether there is some implicit ordering of the value
of certain genres over others in a perfectionist society, leading to concerns
about censorship of the arts for perfectionism.

This could be resolved if Cavell were more consistent in his use of these
films as exemplars for provocation rather than imitation. On this matter it is
necessary to turn back to Rancière whose critique of the spectator relation
helps us to identify more clearly these two models of exemplarity that seem to
be rather blurred in Cavell’s work. In doing this, Rancière can also help us to
resolve the aforementioned concerns about culture and censorship as well as
the question of how to draw on Cavell’s work on aversive thinking while
avoiding the commitment to a particular ethical order.
To do this we need first to acknowledge that all these issues are grounded
on the relationship between the audience and these films that Cavell is pro-
posing. His argument invokes the ancient debate concerning the relationship
between the arts and political community. Plato’s writings on this topic are
well known from The Republic in which his character of Socrates declares
that, first of all, censorship of the arts is necessary to ensure that to avoid
corruption in only good (morally upstanding) examples of poetry, song and
myth can be used in the education of the young. He later revises this to sug-
gest that the arts should be banned entirely from the ideal political commu-
nity to protect the young from any bad influence they may bring. The reason
for this argument is that the relationship between the arts and their audience
is one of imitation, and thus whatever is portrayed artistically will be imitated
directly by those exposed to it. A restatement of this position was famously
resurrected in Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alambert on the Theatre in which,
arguing against d’Alambert and his patron, Voltaire, and many other liberal
Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau suggests that seventeenth-century Geneva
should not revoke its ban on theatre for fear of the bad influence that thea-
trical works could have on the townspeople. The article that prompted this
letter was d’Alambert’s article on Geneva in an encyclopedia which suggested
that Genevans would be improved if the ban were lifted. Yet, although it may
at first seem that Cavell’s desire to see the role of film as educational echoes
d’Alambert’s celebration of the arts to teach the citizenry desirable ‘morals’100
this does not sit well with the above claim that exemplars should not be
imitated but should instead provoke us to think for ourselves.
Clarification of this point is especially pressing in the case of this investi-
gation, since in his essay The Emancipated Spectator Rancière indicates that
both sides in this debate are based on an inaccurate picture of the relationship
between art and the spectator. Both believe that because the artist can con-
trol, at least to some extent, the effect of their art upon its audience they
‘always assume that what will be perceived, felt, understood is what they have
110 Aversivity
put into their dramatic art of performance’.101 In contrast, despite the
aspiration of artists, playwrights and writers, Rancière suggests in the quota-
tion above that they can never control the influence of their art because the
contingency of meaning cannot be controlled once it is let loose into the
social world.102 Thus the aforementioned imitative model of the relation
between art and its spectator is arguably illusory: the relation of imitation
that so concerned Rousseau and Voltaire from their different perspectives is

thereby seen here to be a useful myth to propagate the status of intellectuals
(for example philosophers, playwrights and authors) as society’s inter-
preters.103 Instead, spectators already do and will continue to interpret for
themselves in ways that are beyond the control of any director, playwright,
actor or artist.104
Consequently, Rancière elucidates a different relationship between audience
and art. To begin with he asserts that to assume that spectators are passive
until awakened by the knowledge imparted to them by others is a political
stance founded on an assertion of a natural division of knowledge. Instead, he
claims that the condition of the so-called passive spectator is our normal
condition105 in the sense that although we may often assume spectators to be
passive, the very act of viewing is to be doing something,106 for in the act of
viewing we automatically link what we see and understand to what we have already
seen and said, done and dreamed, in order to understand it. We thereby
weave what we view into the web that is our own individual life course.107
Thus, to denote spectators as ‘passive’ is to disregard them and is therefore
undemocratic as it is based on an inequality that establishes two camps:
the knowledgeable from the ignorant (those most in need of this knowl-
edge); and the active thinker who must educate the passive spectator. Seen in
the light of Rancière’s aforementioned work on emancipation in The Ignorant
Schoolmaster, we see that the division between artist and audience is one of
knowledge giver and ignoramus. If we apply this model of emancipation to
the audience as spectator then here too we need to trust our own judge-
ment and not defer to another’s interpretation.108 To view films democra-
tically requires a willingness to accept one’s own translations of what is
experienced, not by preventing film, or other art forms from telling stories,
but by relating to whatever we encounter in an emancipated way, for ‘an
emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators’, where
all acknowledge their own ability to be ‘active interpreters who develop their
own translation in order to appropriate the “story” and make it their own
story’.109
This therefore encourages us to go beyond Cavell’s focus on remarriage
comedies for democracy. Although he may find them inspiring for his own
work (in the sense of being thought-provoking for him and helping him to see
democratic relationships differently) this is merely, as he recognises, his own
interpretation.110 Hence Rancière’s analysis prompts us to be less restrictive
indicating that any film or indeed, any art form can act as exemplar in that it
can prompt us to consider our own experiences from another perspective.
Aversivity 111
Rancière further translates what this practice of emancipation entails, sug-
gesting that as emancipated spectators we link what we see to that which we
know in order to learn something new ‘if we refuse, firstly, radical distance,
secondly the distribution of roles, and thirdly the boundaries between terri-
tories’.111 Ultimately, then, we are emancipated if we reject the representa-
tions of the world that we inherit, are given or told about by others, and
instead listen to our own thoughts.112 Yet in emphasising this passage it could
appear that there is a danger in supplanting the damaging division between

knowledge giver and knowledge receiver with another unequal relationship –
that of emancipated versus un-emancipated, thereby ignoring Rancière’s con-
cern for equality. Upon consideration, however, it becomes clear that this is
not the case, for the emancipated are not in a relation of power over the
unemancipated because what they assert – that all are of equal intelligence –
unites rather than divides. However, this implies that there are two ways of
being a spectator. In neither case is the spectator passive in the sense of not
thinking. Instead, the crucial difference is whether or not he/she trusts the
authority of his/her own interpretation or whether in the unemancipated
model he/she submits his/her own interpretation to the authority of others.
Yet again, this need not mean that there is a value judgement between the two
practices of spectating. Instead, what Rancière indicates is that the former
practice is one of emancipation and thus one that can lead to ‘politics’ as it
will challenge the entrenching of any police order, whereas the latter will
contribute to conformity within a society.
Instead of using the division between passive and active spectators we have
seen that Rancière refers to the condition whereby we refuse to trust our own
thoughts as one of ‘stultification’ and ‘routine’,113 and identifies a task for
‘disciples of universal teaching’ who announce its practice to others.114 In
identifying that universal teaching is the exhortation to trust one’s own
thought Jacotot’s ‘disciple’ bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Emer-
son inasmuch as the passages in which he exhorts us to think for ourselves,
are telling us to trust our own thoughts. In particular, this is clear in Emer-
son’s claim in ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer
upright; he dares not say “I think”, “I am”, but quotes some saint or sage’.115
Indeed, when we read this alongside the above discussion on the role of
exemplars for Cavellian perfectionism we see that there is a clear strand
within Cavell’s thought that upholds a view of exemplarity as provocation, yet
that this at times becomes blurred with the implication that exemplarity can
also at times be imitative, teaching or instructing us how to behave. Rancière’s
discussion of the emancipated spectator helps us to identify the need to
separate these two models of exemplarity retaining only the provocation
model in order to enable aversive thinking to function as a practice of
challenging the conformity that entrenches police order.
It is suggested that the importance of the exemplar relation as provocation
(as Cavell finds in Emerson) contributes to a practice of aversivity against
conformity, for it is not a relation between people but a practice one can
112 Aversivity
perform to challenge established relations, to assert one’s equality and chal-
lenge others rather than to accept the allocation you have been given. In
contrast, the model of exemplar as imitative implies a hierarchy of social
relations. It is not based on equality but on inequality, with teachers and
students, ‘ignorant’ and ‘knowledgeable’. Thus the exemplar relation as pro-
vocation could be retained as essential to the practice of aversivity understood
as a practice used to challenge police order.
Provoking the self through aversivity

This dialogue between Cavell and Rancière has enabled us to draw out the
way that aversive thinking challenges conformity by configuring the self as
divided and partial, and engaged in unavoidable conversation with its social
order. In order to separate aversive thinking from Cavell’s wider theory of
moral perfectionism it required us to rethink the temporality of the double
self, to reject the need for perfection, and to distinguish between the imitation
and provocation models of exemplarity in order to move away from the
former with its assumption of hierarchy in the order of knowledge, towards
the latter’s focus on equality of intelligences. Hence the practice of aversivity
can be figured as a strategy of resistance to self and society, operating through
an exemplar model of provocation rather than of imitation. Aversivity thus
sees us consenting to our societies inasmuch as we consent to take an interest
in their future, to challenge the direction we are taking, and thereby consent
to dissent. With regard to the above discussion about police order most con-
ducive to ‘politics’ we discover that the most democratic citizens (in the
Rancièrian sense) are not those who subordinate themselves to institutional
rule but the most ‘spirited’ or disordered, for these are the citizens who uphold
our ability to do ‘politics’ – resisting the attempted closure of the social order
by breaking open spaces within the conformity of social values. Hence we can
assert that prior to and beyond the edges of Zuccotti Park, Gezi Park, Tahrir
Square and any other site of democratic struggle, past and present, there is a
practice which gives birth to protest, a dissensual engagement with one’s
social order: the practice of aversivity.
Notes
1 Cited by Cavell (1990: 37–38).
2 Rancière (2009b: 23).
3 Norval (2007, 2012); Owen (2015); Woodford (2016).
4 See Norval (2007, 2012); and Owen (2006) for elaboration of this moral perfec-
tionism as a political project.
5 Rancière (2010d). Before examining this further a note on terminology is needed,
as any exploration into the problem of social conformity immediately invokes the
Gramscian problematic of the hegemonic formation of common sense. Although
at times the terminology of hegemony is useful throughout this work, it will be
borrowed from Gramsci without its accompanying Marxist content. As we have
Aversivity 113
seen, Rancière’s formulation of the way in which conformity is to be overcome
and to what ends (if we can even use the term ‘ends’), while acknowledging its
debts to this tradition, does take us beyond the Gramscian position.
6 Rancière (1991).
7 Ibid.: 30.
8 Ibid.: 102.
9 Ibid.: 105.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 This differs markedly from the neoliberal slogan of ‘doing it for yourself ’ in
terms of what Rancière means by equal capacity. In neoliberal versions of capa-
city, one’s capacity is to work hard, in order to achieve, and to be someone – in
relation to others, to the ‘nobodies’, to the poor and the lazy who apparently
refuse to pull themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps. This is not a vision
of equal capacity but of the stronger person’s ability to embrace competition and
thrive in hierarchy, better than the weaker person’s. In contrast, Rancière
emphasises that his focus is not on empirical ability but on assumed capacity if
the conditions are conducive, thereby circumventing concerns about physical and
mental disabilities (1991: Ch. 3 and in particular p. 46).
13 Rancière (1991: 108).
15 Ibid.
16 Ross (1991: xxii).
17 Rancière (2007b: 48).
18 Rancière (1991: 98, italics in the original).
19 Ibid.: 105.
20 Rancière (2009b: 11).
21 Rancière (1991: 98).
22 Rancière (2009b: 9).
23 Rancière (2007b: 48).
24 Rancière (1991: 108).
25 Other productive readings of the parallels of these thinkers are Norval (2007,
2012); and Owen and Havercroft (2015). In some ways my reading draws on
Norval’s argument that Rancière and Cavell have parallel theories of aspect
dawning (2007) and subjectivation (2012) but it diverges from her call for an
ethos of responsiveness.
26 Emerson (2003: 269).
27 Cavell (1990: 12).
28 Ibid.: 36.
29 Cavell (1988b: 43–44, citing Wittgenstein 1953).
30 Norris (2006b: 92).
31 Although the figure only allows for two perspectives, I am assuming that the
situation for which Wittgenstein uses it to point to can still be one where many
(or possibly infinite) perspectives can exist.
32 Perhaps ‘subject to volition’ makes is more accurate here, see Frankfurt (1971).
33 Cavell (1991: 131), italics in the original.
34 This means that ‘our position is always (already) that of an attained self; we are
from the beginning, that is from the time we can be described as having a self, a
next’ (Cavell 1990: 12). Emerson indicates this when he says that our existence
and our thinking are always partial (ibid.), for we are always only ever able to
attain one step at a time.
35 Rancière (2012a: 82).
36 Rancière (1991: 57).
37 Norval (2012: 812).
114 Aversivity
38 Rancière (2006d: 5).
39 Norval (2012: 819, italics in the original).
40 Ibid.: 824.
41 So named to distinguish it from the ethos of aversion as well as to imitate the
structure of the names of the other practices identified.
42 Cavell (1990: 37).
43 In particular, Cavell interprets this as a precursor to the Heideggerian concern
that despite the apparent development of our societies, we are still not thinking:
‘it would mean capturing the idea of the thing most critically provoking in our
riskily provocative time to be that we are still not really provoked, that nothing
serious matters to us, or nothing seriously, that our thoughts are unscrupulous,
private’ (ibid.).
44 Cavell (1995: 29). Cavell details this argument primarily in two essays: ‘Emer-
son’s Constitutional Amending: Reading ‘“Fate”’ (1995) and ‘Being Odd, Get-
ting Even’ (2003).
45 This Act sought to force the authorities of free states to return slaves to their
masters, making any official who did not act in accordance with this law liable to
a US $1,000 fine, and any individual found assisting a slave liable to six months’
imprisonment as well as a $1,000 fine (the full text of the Fugitive Slave Act is
available at http://www.usconstitution.net/fslave.html).
46 See Garvey (2006) as well as Cavell (1995).
47 Garvey (2006: 161).
48 Cavell (1995, 2003).
49 At least in a purportedly democratic context – for it is only in a democracy that
this takes the form of hypocrisy.
50 Worley (2001: 12).
51 Ibid.
52 Cavell (1995: 18).
53 See Cavell (1990: 5) for his list.
54 Cavell (2005: 3).
55 Ibid.
56 Cavell (1990: 12–13).
57 Cavell (2005: 355).
58 Rawls (1971: 325, note 51, citing Hollingdale 1965: 127, citing Nietzsche 1983: 6).
59 Cavell (1990: 49–50).
60 As outlined in more detail by Norval (2007, 2012) and Owen (2006).
61 Cavell (1990: 10).
62 Cavell (1995: 34). Or as Cavell has come to say ‘as amending our constitution’.
63 Ibid.
64 The complete sentence reads: ‘Good and bad are but names readily transferable
to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong,
what is against it’ (‘Self-Reliance’ in Emerson 2003: 271).
65 Cavell (1995: 34).
66 ‘Self-Reliance’ in Emerson (2003: 266).
67 Cavell (1995: 38).
68 Cavell (2005: 355).
69 The work on consent to our communities arises in Cavell’s critique of John
Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971). Cavell is concerned that in the Rawlsian (con-
tractual) approach to society we find an idea that we consent to ‘the principles
upon which society is based rather than to society as such’ which leads to ‘an
effort to imagine confining or proportioning the consent I give my society’. The
view of consent as finite and limited and based on pre-established principles
concerns Cavell because it appears to limit the extent to which one may feel
implicated in the actions of one’s society and the extent to which one may feel
Aversivity 115
beholden to work at changing it. Hence Cavell claims that it makes no sense to
specify consent to society in particular terms; instead he asserts that we must
recognise that the very content of our consent (and disagreements about it) con-
stitutes part of our shared daily lives. This claim becomes even more interesting
when we recall that the Cavellian citizen is beholden to practice aversive thinking,
the practice of thinking in aversionto one’s society.
70 E.g. Connolly (2005); Honig (1993); Mouffe (2005).
71 See also Norval (2007: 144) on this.
72 Rancière (1999: Ch. 5).

73 Here I build on the differences between Cavell and agonists as outlined by
Norval (2007: 144). Cavell’s approach is further elucidated during his aforemen-
tioned critique of Rawls, drawing on Rawls’ claim that justice concerns ‘what we
can say to one another’. Cavell refers to our shared lives together as lives lived in
‘conversation’ to denote not just that we talk to one another, but a deeper sense
of a ‘way of life together’ (2004: 172–173) and a ‘readiness for exchange’(1990:
104). Cavell borrows this meaning from a well-known passage in John Milton’s
seventeenth-century tract on divorce ‘in which he justifies divorce in terms of a
conception of marriage as “a meet and happy conversation”’ (ibid., citing
Milton). This analogy makes us realise the import we should accord to the depth
of political relationships between citizens, for Cavell emphasises the point made
by Milton’s use of the term conversation, that this idea of conversation ‘is indis-
pensably one of words, but not confined to words’ (ibid.) in that it incorporates
the idea of living lives in common (beyond the mere words exchanged by a
couple) that is embodied in a marriage. This analogy prompts us to realise
accordingly that there is far more to our relationships with those whom we share
our political lives – our fellow citizens – than the words we exchange.
74 Cavell (1981: 151).
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.: 151, italics added.
78 See in particular the discussion in Cavell (1979a, esp. p. 27).
79 Cavell (1999: 22).
80 ‘American Scholar’ in Emerson (2003: 240, italics in the original).
81 Cavell (1990: 54, italics added).
82 ‘American Scholar’ in Emerson 2003: 240–241).
83 Cavell (1990: 54).
84 Ibid.
85 Cavell (1981, 1990, 2004).
86 Cavell (2005: 9).
87 Cavell (1981: 6).
88 Cavell (1981 and 2004 in particular).
89 But not always – and in the case of The Lady Eve explicitly challenges such
sexism.
90 Particularly explored by Gooding-Williams (2006).
91 Dienstag (2016).
92 Consider the example of how American films added to the allure of the GI
marriage for post-war British women who were facing rationing and the scarcity
of goods.
93 Cavell (1981: 7).
94 Cavell (1990: 117).
95 Cavell (1981: 5–7 and 1990: xx); also see defence in Mulhall (1994: 281–282).
96 With regard to sexism see Cavell (1981: 16–18); and with regard to racism see
Cavell’s response to Gooding-Williams (2006).
97 Cavell (1981, 1990, 2004).
116 Aversivity
98 Cavell (1981: 11).
99 Cited by Cavell (1990: 37–38).
100 D’Alambert, cited by Rousseau (1968: 4).
101 Rancière (2009b: 14).
102 Ibid.: 14–15.
103 Ibid.: 8.
104 Ibid.: 14–15.
105 Ibid.: 17.
106 Ibid.: 13.

107 Ibid.
108 Rancière (1991: 13).
109 Rancière (1995: 22).
110 Cavell (1981: 36).
111 Rancière (2009b: 17).
112 Ibid.: 22.
113 Rancière (1991: 108).
114 Ibid.: 98.
115 Emerson (2003: 279).
4 Poeticity
From the glade of cicadas to the island of
the people
No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.

(Jacques Derrida1)
The encounter of literary power with democratic literarity is itself bounded by

the proposition of a new writing of the new community … The fixed gaze
suspended over the island.
Turning now to consider practices that could disrupt ways of saying we can
begin with the discussion of political slogans in which Rancière demonstrates
the doubling of language involved in ‘politics’. These include the appropria-
tion of the term ‘hooligan’ by Eastern Bloc dissidents;3 the 1968 Paris student
slogan ‘we are all German Jews’;4 Blanqui’s appropriation of the term ‘pro-
letarian’;5 and the Australian left’s reworking of the term ‘un-Australian’ to
challenge the use of the term to exclude immigrants and others who are not
considered to fit into the image of Australia built by the centre right.6
Rancière tells us that these are instances of what he refers to as ‘literarity’ in
which certain stigmatised names are appropriated and given a positive affir-
mation to scramble their use and problematise the distribution of order in
which they are being applied.
In his little-cited essay on the term ‘un-Australian’ Rancière further devel-
ops his work on the poetics of ‘politics’. Here he suggests that poetic speech
creates dissensus, which is not a disagreement between two already defined
parties, but a ‘poetic invention’.7 This is dissensus as opposed to redistribution;
it is not a reordering but a break with order (see Chapter 1) for
poetic invention does not mean the invention of an imaginary place. A

place that is elsewhere or nowhere. It means a displacement or a break in a
given set of places and identities. In other words, it is a political matter. There
is a poetics of politics which consists in inventing cases of dissensus.8
Poetic invention involves the appropriation of terms in response to stigmati-

sation.9 It aims to confront the logic of order, the logic that the subject has to
118 Poeticity
be either one identity or another. In this sense, the slogan ‘we are all German
Jews’, used by protestors who were neither German nor Jewish, challenged
the logic that demanded they be either ‘French or foreigner … inside or out-
side … students or agitators, etc.’.10 Hence in chanting this slogan the
demonstrators ‘caused an error in this adequation between bodies, names and
identities’ such that it not only disturbed ‘the normal distribution between
French and foreigners, students and agitators’ but also proclaimed that ‘there
is no intruder, no foreign agitator; we are all intruders’.11 We see that in this

poetic invention the ‘wrong name’ was not designed to identify something, but
instead could only work because it ‘identified nothing’ and in this sense the ‘we’
in the slogan refers to what Rancière refers to as an ‘un-being’: an un-being that
replaces the categories and divisions of the police order with a universal claim
to equality. This construction of un-being through a universal claim is dis-
played by Rancière as a strategy of resistance and challenge to the status quo.
Poeticity is a way of constructing un-being using words and meaning. It
emerges here as a practice whereby un-being can be constructed through
language to rupture police ordering.
An example of such a rupture may be seen in the Occupy Wall Street
slogan ‘We are the 99%’. Indeed, inspired by Rancière Dean asserts that this
slogan ‘claims a division … names a wrong’.12 Here she is referring to a passage
in Dis-agreement in which Rancière tells us that there are two ways in which
‘politics’ exposes a wrong. First, as noted in Chapter 1, the notion of the
demos doubled for both a part of the population of the city as the whole
population of the city. In contrast the wrong exposed by Blanqui’s use of
the term proletariat ‘makes the gap between two peoples explicit: between the
declared political community and the community that defines itself as being
excluded from this community’.13 Thus ‘“Demos” is the subject of the iden-
tity of the part and the whole. “Proletarian” on the contrary subjectifies the
part of those who have no part that makes the whole different from itself ’.14
How is this effected? Rancière tells us that although the judge wanted to
identify workers within the already existing categories of their professions
Blanqui refused this wish, and forced the issue that his ‘superiors’ did not
want to admit. He laid claim to the name proletariat – a name that at the
time merely referred to those who were ‘no more than children makers, men
who were trapped in the domestic world of production and reproduction, and
thereby excluded from the symbolic order of the political community’.15 He
thereby inscribed ‘the uncounted in a space where they are countable as
uncounted’.16 He forced them to recognise that their society was not a har-
monious count of all parts, but that the proletariat (usually regarded as being
so lowly and diminished as to not represent a valuable part of society to the
extent that they were not counted as among its legitimate parts) were suddenly
to be included.
Dean claims that this slogan ‘asserts a “we” of a divided people’.17 It
asserts division, the division between two classes: ‘those who have and control
the wealth, and those who do not’.18 It names a gap ‘that asserts the people as
Poeticity 119
a divisive force in the interest of overturning present society and making a
new one anchored in collectivity and the common’.19 In The Communist
Horizon she argues that this division flies in the face of the reigning order’s
desire to enforce unity upon the people. She cites Obama’s 2008 presidential
election campaign slogans as examples that ‘aimed to obscure division,
attempting to repress and depoliticize it’.20 However, upon examining Ran-
cière’s work on poetic doubling in more detail this chapter will suggest that its
effectiveness does not come from division nor simply from obscuring division.
Poeticity at one and the same time asserts a division that effaces all division.
It does not assert a division that requests a response. In its very emergence it
demonstrates the illogicality of that division, thereby forcing an impact on
any order in which it emerges.
This chapter will depart by tracing the developments of Rancière’s work on
literature. His claim that ‘humans are political animals because they are lit-
erary animals’21 is increasingly capturing scholars’ attention, leading to mul-
tiple discussions of what this means for the way we understand and use
language and literature and precisely how they relate to politics and the
social. In light of this I do not simply wish to add another interpretation to
the many that have recently emerged in English language scholarship. Instead,
I will consider how it may be of value for democratic practice today. In doing
so it is necessary to respond to existing confusion about the translation and
use of the term ‘literarity’, so I will return to Rancière’s French texts to
identify how the concept of literarity developed in his thought over time. I
will demonstrate that it is short-sighted to focus on literarity at the exclusion
of the practice of its application, poeticity, which refers to an open-ended play
with meaning. It is through the practice of poeticity that the disruptive force
of literarity is employed for emancipatory purposes. Literarity’s disruptive
power is emphasised by recognising poeticity as a democratic dissensual
practice, a way of playing with linguistic meaning to provoke rupture.
Throughout this discussion I will elaborate Rancière’s work by contrasting it
with Derrida’s on literarity, politics and democracy. This is necessary since
despite acknowledging Derrida’s influence, Rancière’s thought on literarity is
at once a development and subtle critique of the relationships that Derrida
identifies between politics, democracy and writing. I will argue that Rancière
transects deconstruction to reveal concern about its restrictive political
implications. Consequently, the practice of poeticity enables us to exploit the
disruptive force of literarity in a way that deconstruction cannot. I will con-
clude this chapter by returning to the question above about how we can use
poeticity in political slogans to name division and effect ‘politics’.
Rancière, writing and literarity

It is helpful to begin by identifying Rancière’s key claims about literature and
the literary for those readers who are less familiar with this area of his work.
In sum, Rancière can be understood to have made two central claims in his
120 Poeticity
discussion of literature; first, that the emergence of literature as an art form
was part of a wider shift in aesthetic sensibilities that he labels the ‘aesthetic
regime’; and second, that writing is innately disruptive and the shift from
belles-lettres to literature loosed control over this disruption in such a way as
to allow institutionalised writing to become politically salient. Beginning with
the first claim, Rancière narrates the familiar tale of the emergence of literature:
at the start of the nineteenth century the previous convention-bound ways of

writing were challenged by the emergence of more creative and less regulated
writing. This saw the gradual abandonment of the prior belles-lettres tradition
and the emergence of literature in what we might now consider to be freer
‘poetic’ forms of writing as well as the development of the narrative form in
the shape of the modern novel.22 Rancière thematises this change as a move
from a representative to an aesthetic regime of writing. The representative
regime which dominated since ancient times regarded the role of writing as
one of re-presenting factual events that have actually happened. Both writing
and painting were taken to be comparable media because they gave us two
ways of re-presenting information about a prior event. Both were understood
to play a secondary role to the event which they merely portrayed. This
phonocentrism has already been theorised by Derrida who noted that because
writing was considered a retelling of a live event it was perceived to be less
important than the original speech (phonos) event. Thus the presence and
speech of the actor in the event is valorised over the writing or painting which
is merely a retelling of acts in the actor’s absence.23 According to this regime,
the act of writing or painting is not valued for its own sake.
The emergence of literature markes a departure from this, for it is where
language itself ‘becomes the subject, or matter, of the work rather than merely
the transparent medium of reference to a represented subject’.24 It is no
longer necessary for writing to be understood as secondary to a pre-existing
event; instead, the actual words on the page gain greater significance as the
object of the art. The particular contribution of Rancière’s work in this area is
his claim that this is a shift in ‘regimes’ – from the representative regime to
the aesthetic regime.25 He thematises this along four axes: fiction, genre,
appropriateness and language.26 Under the representative regime, writing
presents to us a fiction in the sense that it tells a story and is thus a repre-
sentation of actions that, whether or not they actually happened, are depicted
as if they did happen. Therefore writing is understood to retell a previous
event.27 Furthermore, the genre of representative writing is dictated by its
subject matter: if it is derived from ‘low culture’ it is comedy or satire; if from
‘high culture’ it is tragedy or epic.28 Relatedly, the actions of the characters in
the representative regime must be deemed ‘appropriate’ to their social sta-
tion.29 Finally, since writing is understood here as an act of representation it
is understood to be based on the ideal of speech as action. Despite telling
fictional stories it does so in a way that submits to the superiority of live
speech in the form of rhetoric and oratory.30 In contrast, Rancière identifies a
move away from this framework in the development of literature under the
Poeticity 121
‘aesthetic regime’. Here writing is valued for its use of language rather than
whether or not it is telling a story; genre is no longer respected and is replaced
by equality between subjects; style is ‘indifferent with respect to the subject
represented’ and writing no longer dwells in the shadow of the ideal that is
speech in action and instead carves out a distinctive space for writing qua
writing.31 Rancière thus suggests that literature constitutes a new poetics: a
new way of constituting the function of the written word.

At this point it is important to note that Rancière is not claiming that there
has been a mutually exclusive shift from one regime to the other, but that in
the main the development of literature reflects these changes. Although some
contemporary writing will no doubt reflect features of the older representative
regime, these features are no longer widely considered to be what constitutes
‘good’ writing. Rancière is hereby making two further claims. First, he iden-
tifies a structural contradiction in literature for if it is the overturning of all
convention regarding both subject and style so that ‘anything goes’ we are left
wondering how it is that we can still distinguish literature as ‘good’ writing
from all other forms of writing. This enables Rancière to elucidate his own
position since he then identifies that this struggle is constitutive of literature.
Second, since literature has no essence he posits that what is deemed to be
literature and what is excluded as simply ‘ordinary’ language is a political
matter. Although Davis has read this as an ‘attempt to revalorise, politicise
and reposition the traditionally scorned and externalised … ordinariness of
ordinary written language against which the work of literature struggles to
define itself as art’,32 this is too strong. Rancière merely shows that the dis-
tinction between ordinary language and literature is not set is stone. He does
not make a claim that any particular language should be valorised at the
expense of another, rather he identifies that any attempt to privilege and fix
the identity of literature over ordinary language is unfounded and functions to
include and legitimise some voices at the expense of others.
Rancière’s claim that writing is disruptive is inspired by the myth of the
invention of writing as recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. According
to the legend, writing was invented by Theuth, an Ancient Egyptian deity,
who went at once to the royal court of King Thamus to offer his invention for
the use of the kingdom describing it as an aid to memory. Thamus was not
impressed. Rancière tells us that this is for three reasons. First, writing leaves
many things unexplained so that written instructions for an art will never be
able to communicate enough to teach a novice, and instead is only of value to
remind those who already know.33 As such Rancière notes that writing cannot
speak beyond the information that is on the page; it remains mute in the face
of a perplexed reader seeking to know more.34 Second, this muteness can
curiously make the written letter too talkative since it is not guided by
anyone; it can go anywhere, speak to anyone and be interpreted in various
ways without being able to speak up and correct the reader. Third, the written
word is thus like an orphan, without a master to explain how it is to be read
and direct it to the right reader and as such ‘it can neither defend itself not
122 Poeticity
come to its own support’.35 These features endow writing with a disruptive
potential. It has the capacity of saying more than the author intended, and to
address people other than those whom the author sought to address. It fails
to respect the rules and order of society. Writing can be said to be political
owing to its availability in the sense of the constant availability of language
for reappropriation and reinterpretation over time. Rancière refers to this
availability of meaning that effects disruption as ‘literarity’. As noted above,
the three claims about the lack of ‘essence’ for both writing and literature in
large part echo prior arguments made by Derrida. However, it will be shown
below that Rancière’s theory of literarity not only draws out much more
explicitly the politics implied by this reading of literature and writing, but in
doing so turns Derrida’s argument back on itself.
‘Literarity’ or ‘literariness’?
To overcome concerns about Rancière’s theory of literarity in a way that will
help us to grasp the full force of this argument it is necessary first to take a
detour that will help us to navigate our way around confusion in the English
language scholarship. The confusion is perhaps caused and certainly com-
pounded by a lack of consistency in the translation of the single term litera-
rité from French to English because it has sometimes been translated
‘literariness’ and other times ‘literarity’. This has led to the mistaken assump-
tion that there are two distinct concepts at work here when there is actually
only one. This inconsistency is furthered by Rancière’s own shift in the way he
conceptualises literarity. Initially, he uses it merely to denote the excess of
meaning for words, but later it also comes to encompass the disruption that
this excess can cause.
Let us begin by unpicking these issues one at a time to see how they play
out in the dominant texts on Rancière and literarity today. First, it is neces-
sary to note that this concept has a small but increasingly important role in
Rancière’s work,36 yet his usage of it has shifted subtly over time37 until clar-
ified in The Politics of Aesthetics where he tells us that literarité is both the
condition of the availability of meaning and the effect of this availability in
terms of the disruption it causes. 38
Difficulty in appreciating the genealogical development of this term has
been compounded by the order in which these texts have been translated into
English.39 The French term literarité was translated as literariness in the first
three of these texts, The Names of History, Dis-agreement, and Mute Speech;
and rendered as literarity in the latter two interviews as well as in The Flesh of
Words and The Politics of Aesthetics. This is doubly unfortunate since it not
only gives a false impression of a chronological development from one term
to the other; but the sheer existence of two modes of communicating the lit-
erary nature of something – as literarity or literariness – in the English lan-
guage also thereby dilutes the jarring effect of Rancière’s work which plays
explicitly on his appropriation of the term literarité from literary theory where
Poeticity 123
it denotes an essence internal to a language that could be identified in litera-
ture but not in everyday writing and therefore enables us to distinguish
between writing as art and writing as everyday.40
Since English readers are thus presented with ‘literariness’ in Rancière’s
earlier texts and ‘literarity’ in the later ones41 some commentators appear
understandably to have assumed that he moved from an earlier term to a later
one, denoting this shift in his work on literarity from the availability of
meaning to its more explicitly political use.42 Yet as noted above, this is more
than a simple mistake based on inconsistent translation as the possibility that
this claim could be made depends on the underlying fact that Rancière’s usage
of the term does shift over time leading to a variety of interpretations. To sum
up these differences, we have those who do not distinguish between literari-
ness and literarity;43 others who indicate that both terms refer to the disrup-
tion caused by writing;44 still others who suggest that literariness is simply the
excess of words while literarity is the political import of this excess,45 and
finally Robson’s take on this, whereby he presents literariness as excess and
literarity as the way in which this excess can be employed.46 It is unsatisfy-
ingly uncritical to conclude that such variation simply arises from inconsistent
translation. In each case commentators have provided an enlightening dis-
cussion of Rancière’s work that offers us applications and critique of literarity
regardless of these differences. They also do not differ with regard to their
interpretation of Rancière’s overall argument that writing has a disruptive
power, nor with his claim that writing is democratic, and that the disruption
of writing is constitutive of literature which as a consequence needs to remain
open and recognise itself as a site of agonistic struggle. However, if we accept these
inconsistencies too many questions remain regarding first, the exact relation-
ships between writing, literature, ‘politics’ and democracy; and second, how
writing specifically effects disruption and how this can be employed. In addi-
tion, there are also questions about the historical emergence of literature as
art and its relationship with writing in general concerning why it emerged at a cer-
tain point in time and whether this means that writing’s force to disrupt is always
inherent in writing and therefore how and why it was merely released by the aes-
thetic turn; or whether writing’s disruptive power was created by socio-historical
conditions at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Consequently, despite unpicking the confusion about literarity in Rancièr-
ian scholarship more work is needed to gain a more precise understanding of
the relationship between his claims about literature and this apparent political
potential of writing to disrupt. This is an incongruous task in that I wish to
seek further precision over the meaning of a term that Rancière uses to
denote the radical lack of precision in meaning. The irony is that despite
acknowledging the inability of meaning ever to be fixed once and for all, if we
are to exist we cannot do without assigning meanings to words and seeking to
use these words to communicate. Hence better identifying the spirit of the
meaning Rancière gives to literarity in his own writing will help us to think
about linguistic and extra-linguistic strategy for Rancièrian ‘politics’.
124 Poeticity
The need to continue with this task is particularly clear when reading the
divergent interpretations of literarity offered by two of the most recent book-
length commentaries on Rancière’s work: Oliver Davis’s Jacques Rancière47
and Sam Chambers’ The Lessons of Rancière.48 Rather than attempting to
throw a third interpretation into the ring in opposition to these I suggest that
reading Davis and Chambers together on literarity helps us to clarify Ran-
cière’s thought on the relationship between language and his notion of ‘poli-
tics’. It also helps to identify areas where more attention may be needed to
explicate this relationship in order to evaluate how Rancière’s work contributes
to our understanding of how language may be utilised to create conditions
that are more conducive for Rancièrian ‘politics’ today.
To begin with, Davis raises three concerns about Rancière’s failure to dis-
cuss the limitations that structural conditions impose on literarity’s disruptive
power. He wonders why Rancière limits his discussion of the disruption that
words can cause to writing rather than incorporating recorded speech.49 He
identifies that Rancière has not done enough to consider the social conditions
under which writing can be disruptive (availability of writing and literacy
rates and censorship).50 Moreover, he is concerned that Rancière’s depiction
of writing as orphan makes it overly optimistic, and drawing on Lacan asserts
that its users will not necessarily be able to break out of the pre-scripted
power relations they unwittingly propagate.51
In contrast to Davis, Chambers takes literarity to be far less problematic.
In his reading, literarity ‘can be read back into and through [Rancière’s] wider
body of writings’ in a way that reveals it to be central to his whole philoso-
phical project, beyond just the essays on literature.52 He thereby suggests that
Rancière identifies literarity as a kind of force of disorder which therefore
always haunts all attempts at ordering, including those attempts by philoso-
phy itself. Reading literarity in this way means that Chambers sees it as a
development of Rancière’s whole philosophy and thus seeks to situate it more
broadly in relation to his ‘politics’/police framework.
In applying literarity Chambers at first seems to accept that literarity
names the way that writing disrupts order. Yet he swiftly takes literarity
beyond writing to claim that it ‘names the countervailing force to “police”’.53
Drawing on Rancière’s claim in The Ignorant Schoolmaster that ‘all words,
written or spoken, are a translation that only takes on meaning in the counter-
translation’54 he suggests that Rancière is arguing here, contra Plato, that the
strong distinction between speech and writing as two different types of dis-
course is misleading inasmuch as it fails to acknowledge that ‘all language is
translation’ and thus speech should ‘never be elevated above’ writing.55 In
particular, Chambers notes Rancière’s use of the word ‘counter-translation’56
positing that this indicates ‘the interminability of the process of translation
itself. Every translation must be translated again, such that meaning can
never be fixed once and for all. There is an excess of words.’57
Chambers takes this ‘excess’ to be that which Rancière refers to by the
name ‘literariness’ which Chambers asserts is related to but still distinct from
Poeticity 125
‘literarity’. In contrast to literariness understood as the mere availability of
58
meaning, literarity is for Chambers ‘a political term’ for it is that which

‘makes disagreement possible; it serves as the condition of possibility for dis-
identification’.59 As such, literarity appears to us as ‘a category separate from
both writing and literature’60 and instead names disorder. Chambers suggests
that Rancière uses this term in a similar manner to his notion of ‘disagree-
ment’, citing the interview with Panagia in which Rancière claims that ‘lit-
erarity disrupts the relation between an order of discourse and its social
functions’.61 Thus literarity, concerning ‘the availability and accessibility of
“writing” to everyone’,62 is the condition of Rancière’s ‘disagreement’ and so
Chambers claims that there is ‘no disagreement without literarity’.63 Conse-
quently, in Chambers’ reading literarity is central to Rancière’s democratic
‘politics’ for it is in the ‘polemical’ scenes of who counts and does not count
as a speaking being that literarity is at work.
In sum, what makes Chambers’ reading so compelling is the way in which
he places literarity in the context of Rancière’s wider project and in so doing
indicates that literarity’s potential to disrupt is not limited to writing but is
present in the play of all words and meaning. This enables the political import
of literarity to be drawn out more than in Davis’s interpretation. Further-
more, it provides a way of responding to some of Davis’s concerns. First, the
way Chambers reads literarity as operating beyond the written word reveals
that, as Davis suggested, it can operate in other encounters with words and
meanings such as recorded speech. It also means that literarity could be at
work in challenging the ‘pre-scripted social-psychic texts’64 that lead indivi-
duals to conform to social norms rather than to question them. Moreover, the
concerns about literacy rates and censorship seem to dwindle in light of
Chambers’ work, since access to literarity could occur via alternative forms of
word encounter. Furthermore, this diversity poses a wider challenge to
attempts to censor, thus making it far harder and requiring much greater
oppression and control (in terms of speech and thought as well) than if the
control of literarity were just limited to the censorship of writing.65
However, Chambers’ reading does not help us to respond to Davis’s wider
concern regarding the socio-historic conditions under which literarity is
available since the degree of rupture literarity can effect could still be seen to
depend on the social agency of subjects. Furthermore, there is another sur-
prising element to Chambers’ argument that requires a little more attention
since in suggesting that literarity is ‘the countervailing force to “police”’66 he
seems to be claiming that literarity is Rancière’s new word for ‘politics’ as it
was understood in Chapter 1. This is significant because it could indicate
revision of Rancière’s earlier work on ‘politics’, and also, without further
attention, could be taken to signal a shift in Rancière’s work from the mate-
rial to the symbolic (discursive), thereby misdirecting readers away from the
implications of Rancière’s work for material redistribution. In the remainder
of this chapter I will unfold the argument that literarity is not a replacement
for Rancière’s ‘politics’ and that Rancière’s underlying principal concern is
126 Poeticity
neither the material nor the symbolic but the negotiation of the relationship
between the two that for him constitutes the ever shifting boundaries of our
being. In doing so I will also respond to Davis’s remaining concern.
Retracing literarity against Derrida

Since Rancière is fond of telling us that we need to begin at the beginning67 it
is fitting to return with him once more to his initial use of the term literarity
and trace its development through his wider work in order to see how it
evolved vis-à-vis his thought on ‘politics’ and democracy. Indeed, in his own
words Rancière has informed us that
[f]rom the very beginning, my concern has been with the study of thought
and speech there where they produce effects, that is, in a social battle that
is also a conflict, renewed with each passing instant, over what we perceive
and how we can name it.68
Yet a particular concern with the manner in which thought and speech is
expressed in writing remains implicit in his earliest works and only explicitly
emerges from the 1980s onwards, beginning with the notion of ‘theotocracy’
to refer to the disruptive power that stems from the availability of the arts.69
The salience of this availability is then discussed more via the new term lit-
erarity that first emerges in The Names of History and Mute Speech and lies
behind his comments on ‘politics’ and literary animals in Dis-agreement. This
is finally clarified to refer also to the disruptive power of writing. His next
book, The Flesh of Words, sketches out the relationship between literarity,
‘politics’ and democracy in more detail. He then theorises this latter rela-
tionship in more detail in the essays ‘The Politics of Literature’ and ‘Literary
Misunderstanding’.
Although reading Rancière’s work accompanied by the knowledge of where
he ends up does help us to uncover the roots of the concept of literarity, the
approach of looking for something that was actually coming into being as a
process over time gives an artificial impression that it existed prior to Ran-
cière’s own practice of writing. Instead, although this rereading helps us to
recognise key stages in the development of literarity, rather than cherry-
picking these sections from his work it is essential to read them in tandem
with his wider project in this period, which was the development of a critical
commentary on the ‘poetics of knowledge’ understood as ‘the literary proce-
dures by which a particular form of knowledge establishes itself as a scientific
discourse’.70 This was inspired by his years of research in nineteenth-century
workers’ archives, which drew his attention to the multiplicity of voices that
exist at any one time, and the impressive ability of the emerging sciences to
block these out. In his subsequent works he seeks to elaborate the way in
which each scientific discourse is actually constructed as an agonistic site of
struggle between the voices included and excluded, all conditioned through
Poeticity 127
the medium of writing, which initially comes to take centre stage in his
thought during this period.
From the 1980s onwards Rancière explores this theme from various angles,
beginning with philosophy, then history, and finally moving on to literature.
Before examining this ourselves it is worth noting that he chooses to use the
term ‘poetics’ here in order to emphasise the creative element of writing. In its
earliest usage, poetry simply refers to the arts in general, and poetics refers to
the way that the arts are understood as manifestations of human creativity.
Hence the term ‘poetics of knowledge’ alerts us to the fact that all knowledge
is constructed and thus is a work of creativity. Rancière’s attention is on how
this construction takes place and in particular how the medium of writing
shapes the knowledge that can be presented in it, while in turn being shaped
itself.71
One text that helps us to situate Rancière’s work on the various poetics of
knowledge is The Ignorant Schoolmaster.72 As discussed in Chapters 1 and 3,
this text argues that the division of knowledge is at play behind all instances
of inequality. A study of the poetics of knowledge must take into account the
division between the traditional way of partitioning knowledge in society
which functions to distinguish between savant and ignoramus, and its oppo-
site which is found in the axiomatic equality of all. As Rancière uses this text
to elucidate his position on knowledge more clearly, it can be seen as the lens
through which all of Rancière’s other essays should be read.73 This approach
enables us to identify that even in the opening pages of his earlier text, The
Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière’s polemic is aimed at the academy as
much as at the world beyond its gates: from the very beginning of philosophy
there has been a desire to contain the creative force of change by limiting its
availability to the elites of any ordering. Order may be reconfigured but the
very definition of order is that a new elite will form who will keep the domi-
nant knowledge of that ordering to themselves. Thus all political struggle is
first and foremost a struggle over knowledge, and a struggle over truth.74
After generalising this argument in The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière
seeks to test this hypothesis in disciplines beyond philosophy, beginning with
history75 and then turning to literature itself.76 In doing so he frequently
refers to three tropes from Plato: theotocracy; the invention of writing; and
the myth of the cicadas. Theotocracy is used by Plato to refer to the increas-
ing availability of the arts, first music then poetry, to anybody and everyone
via the democratisation of the Ancient Greek theatre – access to which was
widened to remove income restrictions and to ensure free access during the
democratic years. Rancière is particularly interested by the discussion of
theotocracy in Plato’s Laws which denotes the growing dominance of ‘an
opinion that all are competent in everything’.77 Rancière notes Plato’s treat-
ment of this to emphasise two points: first, theotocracy, understood as the order
of the people, is an enemy to the well-ordered city and therefore an enemy to
philosophy, for the well-ordered city is the city of philosophy, the city ruled by
philosopher kings – where each man attends only to his one role and thus all
128 Poeticity
the parts harmoniously come together to form a unity that is greater than the
sum of all its parts. Rancière wishes to highlight this starting point to make
his argument that not only the foundation of philosophy but its continuation
up to the present day, including the political philosophy of Marx, is founded
on a division of labour that underlies class with another division that renders
the workers unable to think for themselves and therefore in need of being led.
Second, Rancière is able to note here the partitioning of philosophy and the
work of thinking as separate from the arts, which Plato deems dangerous and
corrupting for philosophy. He maintains that both these divisions between phi-
losophers and ordinary labour and between philosophy and the arts persists in
philosophy today and that it is only by questioning and critiquing the ways in
which philosophy opposes equality and the arts that we can begin to overcome
the material inequalities of the world founded on these ideas.
Another way of figuring the danger writing holds for philosophy is found in
the second trope. Drawing this time on the aforementioned myth of Theuth
and Thamus Rancière notes the danger of writing in that it makes words
available to any who can read them, rather than limiting exposure to a speech act, a
moment in time when a speaker speaks specifically to address a particular
audience.78 We see a third division emerge here, this time a division between
those who can access philosophical knowledge. Thus these tropes highlight
the divisions of labour, discipline and access to knowledge; characterised here
in the distinctions between philosophers and labourers; philosophy and the
arts; and speech versus writing. It is writing’s errant nature that makes it
particularly dangerous for philosophy since a written account has the poten-
tial to entrap ideas, sneak them out of a specified location (their ‘proper’
place, time, speaker and audience) and deliver them to anybody. It could not
be guaranteed to respect the aforementioned divisions between the work of
philosophers and ordinary labourers, and between philosophy and the arts.
Furthermore, according to Rancière, since the time of Plato philosophy has
been the systematisation of thought which seeks to assign order and place. To
ensure that knowledge is a tool of ordering rather than a challenge to it phi-
losophy needs to control errancy to ensure that the division between philoso-
pher and labourer and the activities of philosophy and the arts remain
separate.
Finally, then, Rancière seeks to emphasise that the division of disciplines
and access to knowledge rest on the previous division of labour by noting that
in the same text, and prior to the recounting of the myth of Theuth, Plato
records philosophy’s fear of the thoughts of the ordinary people. The dialogue
begins as Socrates and Phaedrus escape the midsummer heat of the city by
taking a walk in the countryside. They eventually pause at midday in a shady
spot by the river where the cicadas are singing. At this point in the dialogue
Socrates recounts an old myth in which the cicadas are said to be an ancient
race of people. Enchanted by the singing of the Muses they wasted away,
distracted from worldly needs. Flattered by this attention the Muses sent them
back into the world in the form of cicadas, able to sing for their whole lives.
Poeticity 129
After they died they were required to repay this kindness by reporting to each
Muse the names of the mortals who had honoured them. To the most
important Muses, Calliope and Urania, the cicadas had to report who had
led a philosophical life.79 Accordingly, Socrates tells Phaedrus that while
under the watchful gaze of the cicadas, they must be careful to keep talking
despite the heat and not to fall asleep as common labourers would do.80 In
this distinction Rancière notes a simple but important point: here labourers
are taken to be those whose lives are dominated by the simple material needs
of life, to eat and sleep enough to be able to work all day at their trade. In
contrast, the philosopher, as a higher being, is one who has leisure time and
as a matter of duty must devote it to philosophical conversation. Philosophy
is thus denoted the preserve of the intellectual and not something that ordin-
ary people need to bother themselves with. What interests Rancière in this
myth is the distinction drawn between the ordinary people, who are depen-
dent upon the material, and the philosopher, or divine man, who has access
to the world of the arts, to music, poetry and literature. From this distinction
is born two types of human being: not just the proletariat and bourgeoisie of
socialist thought, divided via their relation to the means of production, but a
further distinction about who has legitimate access to language, and who
must remain silent, asleep under the watchful gaze of the cicadas.81
The import of Rancière’s reading of this myth can be emphasised in com-
parison with Derrida. Derrida’s reading of the same text focuses almost
exclusively on the story of Theuth and Thamus which he reads to reveal the
phonocentrism82 and thus logocentrism83 of Western philosophy, indicating
the power imbalance therein, and the violent exclusions that Western thought
effects.84 Yet the added point about the distinction between the labourers and
the philosophers in Rancière’s reading is more political.85 It draws attention
to the outcome of this imbalance in terms of who benefits and who is exclu-
ded. Not only will all writing and indeed all thought be used to effect exclu-
sion, but so will the relationship between the division of knowledge that underlies
this exclusion and its material consequences. The addition to the discussion of
the myth of writing with the commentary on the myth of the cicadas
emphasises the destabilising political force that is available in the errancy of
writing and its uncontainable creative force.
Rancière employs these tropes in various locations. In The Philosopher and
his Poor86 they are used to show how from the very beginning philosophy has
sought to carve out a privileged position for itself and thus for its practi-
tioners, away from the necessary labours of the ordinary people. This indi-
cates why a political philosophy that seeks to emancipate, such as Marxism, is
doomed from the start because it presumes rather than challenges this divi-
sion. Rancière subsequently tests this hypothesis with regard to both history
and literature. In The Names of History he demonstrates that the study of
history will always exclude voices since it is only ever really able to tell stories,
despite seeking to raise this storytelling to the status of a ‘science’. Within the
formal study of history, Rancière argues that the voices of the poor, the
130 Poeticity
marginalised, and the excluded, will never be heard by dint of these people
either being ignored or spoken for by others.87 This is not just a recognition of
the contingency of history but an analysis of the way that this contingency is
structured by the very practice of writing history which means that the
excluded voices are present in their absence in the sense that the lack of clo-
sure that writing gives and the ever present alternatives within any one text
mean that alternative voices haunt every account. Yet it is only by drawing
attention to this that we can start to appreciate the lack of history. It is in this
text that he first introduces the term literarity which is here identified as a
property of human beings – that which renders each of us a ‘literary
animal’.88 Furthermore, he notes that our literarity is in turn actually neu-
tralised by literature – the art of writing – as it seeks to restrain the power
through which the word’s availability to the human mind enables humans to
endlessly interpret, retell and revise histories, submitting it to set rules or
structures. At this point Rancière claims that the study of history also needs
to control the errant letter by restraining the literarity of the people in the
sense of people’s endless ability to exploit the availability of meaning, to
interpret and reinterpret differently. We are prompted here to see that Ran-
cière’s overall concern is that in the study of anything the academy distin-
guishes the privileged voices over the others and therefore close off all our
disciplines to the marginalised and oppressed whose histories are never heard
and whose thinking is thereby foreclosed.
Given Derrida’s famous reading of the myth of Theuth in Plato’s Phar-
macy,89 it seems too much of a coincidence that Rancière’s chooses the same
text to supplement the same point made by Derrida with a further comment
about the elitism and hierarchies perpetrated by philosophy. I cannot help but
read Rancière’s reading of the myth of the cicadas as an implicit critique of
Derridean deconstruction. Rancière paints an implicit analogy between the
way that Derrida not only missed or chose to overlook the political import of
this loaded statement in the Phaedrus but also, according to Rancière’s read-
ing (elaborated in Chapter 2), more generally shied away from the political
import of deconstruction, using instead the structure of the messianic ‘to
come’ to endlessly defer political questions.90 This is particularly apparent
given that Rancière’s reading of the Phaedrus first appears in a text critiquing
the elitism of philosophy and the way it is used to maintain divisions rather
than break them down even when it declares specific emancipatory aims.91
Rancière’s point can also be seen to relate to the fact that Derrida’s focus
remained squarely within the academy. Although Derrida undermined the
privileging of philosophy over literature conceptually92 and in a way that
prefigures Rancière’s work in this area, in practice it never moved out of the
domain of accepted academic disciplines to engage with the ordinary in the
way that Rancière has sought to do.
Since we will return to Derrida later, and having outlined these prior stages
of Rancière’s thought, we are ready to turn once again to Rancière’s work on
literature for we can now see that it forms just one step in a wider project.
Poeticity 131
However, this is a particularly fruitful step. In his next book-length work,
The Flesh of Words, Rancière finally turns his problematic in on itself. Up
until this point he had focused on the relationship between writing and
other disciplines, first philosophy then history, but his third step is to examine
the relationship between writing and itself, in the sense of considering the art
of writing that has come to be known as literature and how it is constituted
and challenged by the media through which it is communicated: the prac-

tice of writing. As noted above, in Mute Speech Rancière traces the emer-
gence of literature to argue that literature is a democratic art form born out
of and indeed enabled by the revolutionary values of the democratic age. This
in itself does not constitute a claim for Rancière since it is widely accepted
that literature emerged in the post-revolutionary era at the end of the eight-
eenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century whereby the growing
popularity of ideals of equality and freedom led to the overturning of the
ancien régime.93 The old hierarchies and rules surrounding the art of writing
were rejected as part of this signalling of an end to the formal tradition of
belles-lettres and the appearance of a new, popular narrative form in the
development of romantic poetry and writing and the emergence of the
modern novel. This anti-hierarchical writing was able to flourish in the new
democratic age. What is unique about Rancière’s retelling of this story is the
relationship he draws between the emergence of literature in relation to
democracy.
It is important to note here that Rancière never suggested that either phi-
losophy or history were themselves democratic, merely that when they
became written disciplines they contained within them the potential for
equality which it seems remained in the large part locked away until released
(albeit only ever partially) by the spirit of democracy following the revolu-
tionary era. This gave them a democratic force which challenged any attempt to
establish and define them in a fixed manner. However, in turning to investi-
gate literature Rancière is setting himself a double challenge for he is inter-
ested in outlining the way that literature emerged in the democratic age.
Although it too had to suppress the equality that was potentially within
writing in order to establish itself as an art this inhered a greater paradox
than the claim about philosophy and history. Whilst philosophy and history
pre-date the democratic era, Rancière’s claim is that literature as a discipline
was born out of the democratic urge and is itself the art of writing democra-
tically, writing by anybody for anybody, yet it is also an ‘art’: a ‘correct’ way
of writing, a correct way of undermining and challenging the correct, an art
of directing the undirectable, the art of organising the un-organisable. Hence
Rancière’s argument about literature is twofold: literature suppresses the
democratic drive within it as all disciplines must in order to be constituted as
a discipline; however, literature itself is democratic and hence is constituted by a
contradiction that we do not find at the constitutional level of philosophy and
history. Thus Rancière’s engagement with literature and literary theory is
deeper and more complex than his studies on philosophy and history, for in
132 Poeticity
these essays we see him carefully unpicking the contradictory strands that
constitute literature as a discipline and a practice. In doing this it becomes
necessary for him to identify the spirit of writing (literarity) from the art
(literature). Let us examine this process in more detail.
As we have already seen, Rancière claims that writing is in spirit a demo-
cratic practice. Drawing once more on the tropes of the invention of writing
and the myth of the cicadas he notes how Plato’s concern with the anti-hier-
archical power of writing to disrupt and challenge order was what prompted
him to suggest that it had no place in the ideal community governed by the
philosopher kings. This ability to disrupt is possible because of literarity in
the sense of the ‘availability’ of the errant letter which, as a prompt for dis-
ruption, is therefore presented here as a principle of redistribution,94 a prin-
ciple whereby given distributions are challenged and refigured. Because
writing is therefore a mechanism by which the order of being, doing and
saying can be refigured it appears that writing is related in some way to
Rancière’s moment of ‘politics’, the moment of the universal claim to equality.
Indeed, Rancière suggests that:
Democracy is the regime of writing, the regime in which the perversion

of the letter is the law of the community. It is instituted by the spaces of
writing whose overpopulated voids and overly loquacious muteness rends
the living tissue of the communal ethos.95
The errancy of the letter, here typified by writing has the power to rupture
order and create an opening for the new. Democracy as rupture depends on
this. Yet let us recall Davis’s aforementioned concern that writing is not as
democratic as Rancière claims, since although if one is literate it is possible to
read any writing and interpret at will, literacy is far from guaranteed in many
societies. Hence if Rancière’s claim is that writing itself is in some way
democratic, he needs to attend to the social conditions which structure who
has access to reading and writing and who does not.
On top of this concern about access, an apparent inconsistency emerges, for
on the one hand Rancière tells us that literature emerges because of democ-
racy – because of the dawning of the democratic age – but on the other hand,
writing carries within it a potential for equality which brings about democ-
racy. This seems simultaneously to claim that writing causes democracy while
democracy causes writing. Although Rancière has claimed that the demo-
cratic power of writing is unleashed via the democratic turn and this then has
the potential to maintain democracy within our current paradigm, he has told
us nothing about his understanding of the socio-historical conditions that led
to the emergence of the democratic era, nor how to guard against its subver-
sion and redirection into a non-democratic age in the future.96 Without
addressing this further Rancière’s theory of writing risks being reduced to
mere observation, lacking in critical dimension.
Poeticity 133
Doubling democracy, doubling literature
If we recall Rancière’s retelling of the tale of the Plebeian revolt on the
Aventine Hill, we can see that these concerns are too hasty, for he uses this
story to demonstrate an instance of ‘politics’ that took place before the
modern revolutionary age. To break open this apparent tautological circle we
need to remember Rancière’s penchant for using words and concepts against
themselves. We note that Rancière has two ways of thinking about democ-
racy:97 first, as a system of government; and second, as a moment of equality.
In the Rancièrian schema it seems that although humans may try to institute
democracy as a system of government based on equality, they will only ever
be able to institute oligarchy because as soon as one instantiation of equality
is instated at the expense of others, it will be ruled by those who benefit from
it and who will become the new oligarchs. Democracy, understood as a
positing of equality, cannot be instituted. Noting this will make us more
attentive to Rancière’s use of the terms democracy and democratic, in parti-
cular his assertion that we are living in an age many would refer to as
democratic but only in an institutionalised sense, for it is merely the age in
which democracy has been instituted as a representative system of
government.
Furthermore, Rancière tells us that there are two competing forces in lit-
erature which means that it is founded on the aforementioned paradox
whereby literature embodies the power of writing to subvert all rules of what
is and is not literature at the same time as being a discipline that therefore
needs to control this disruptive force.98 He theorises this paradox in his essay
‘The Politics of Literature’99 in which he explains that literature does two
things: it does democracy understood as the moment of equality in that
it marks the collapse of the system of differences that allowed social

hierarchies to be represented. It achieves the democratic logic of writing
without a master and without a purpose, the great law of the equality of
all subjects and of the availability of all expressions, that marks the
complicity of absolutized style with the capacity of anyone at all to grab
any words, phrases or stories.100
In this sense it effects a break with what has gone before. Yet it also establishes a
new order, for Rancière tells us that literature simultaneously
opposes the democracy of writing with a new poetics that invents other
rules of appropriateness between the significance of words and the visi-
bility of things. It identifies this poetics with a politics or, rather, a meta-
politics, if metapolitics is the right word to describe the attempt to
substitute, for the stages and utterances of politics, the laws of a ‘true
stage’ that would serve them as a foundation.101
134 Poeticity
Literature is born out of disruption but subsequently ever seeks to suppress its
literarity, instituting a new stylised form of apparently unregulated writing – a
‘poetics’ – which can be understood to function more as a form of police
ordering that forecloses ‘politics’. In The Flesh of Words he says that writing
in literature is at one and the same time ‘an imbalance of the legitimate order
of discourse, of the way in which it is distributed’. It is also an act of dis-
tribution, whereby it is distributing ‘bodies in an ordered community.102 Lit-
erature is born out of the unleashing of meaning, yet is destined to a perpetual

struggle to avoid being put back on its leash as a particular instantiation of
this freedom from rules of meaning.
In light of this paradox, we see that the quotation above suggests that it is
writing rather than literature that can institute democracy in terms of a
moment of rupture or break with that which has gone before. If we take the
doubling of democracy alongside the paradox of literature whereby it con-
tains both the practice of writing that has the potential to rupture fixed
meanings and the art of writing in literature, then we can see that each usage
of writing corresponds with each type of democracy. Writing as rupture is
writing that can prompt a moment of democracy by breaking with prior
meaning, whereas writing as art in the form of literature, a particular recog-
nised form of ‘writing without rules’, is the writing of the age in which
democracy has been instituted as a representative system of government.
Hence literature is the art of writing in the age of democracy and in this sense
the move to the democratic age facilitated the emergence of literature as a
discipline. However, writing’s potential to rupture has always existed and thus
has always been able to prompt moments of equality. It is not limited to the
prior existence of democratic institutions.
We can now understand how literature is born out of democracy while
simultaneously causing democracy. At the time of the French Revolution the
new ideas of equality came to operate in society to challenge all the old ways
of being, saying and doing. At this moment many new forms were instituted,
including a new art of writing: literature. Literature was brought into being
alongside the institution of the democratic system of government because
both were brought about by the emergence of the revolutionary discourse of
equality. As such, the discipline of literature contributes to and accompanies
the resulting particular democratic system of government, since it embodies
or stages a particular type of equality. This is the same instantiation of
equality upon which the current democratic system is based – the refusal to
acknowledge hierarchy in terms of the topics and subject matter of writing
and the inclusion and focus on minor details at the expense of grander
themes.103 Literature counters hierarchical order by undermining and oppos-
ing it through fragmentation. This gives literature a strange status between
order and disorder, for although we have seen that it was bought into being
by the revolutionary era, it upholds the bourgeois values of equality upon
which this was founded and as such challenges any move to establish any
further alternative order. It therefore supports and maintains the order in
Poeticity 135
which liberal democracy is considered a legitimate system of government. The
revolutionary moment which led to both the new system of government and
the birth of literature was ‘politics’ in the Rancièrian sense. It involved the
universal positing of equality. Yet it was quickly ordered back into police
ordering, such that politically the first bourgeois state was born, and in terms
of writing, new rules, styles and notions of the ‘correct’, of better and worse
writing, crept into literature to form it as a new discipline. Hence we see that
Rancière’s claim that literature is democratic does not mean that literature is
necessarily democratic in the sense of democracy as a moment of radical
equality. Instead, it is the art of writing that accompanies the democratic age.
As such, although a more complex discussion of the socio-historic conditions
through which literature emerged may have helped to avoid these confusions,
it seem that Rancière has already provided us with the information we need
here, for he tells us that it was the romantic ideas that flourished in the wake
of the revolution that allowed the new art form of literature to emerge, but
that the potential for equality that it contained has always been present in
writing and thus does not wholly depend on any particular social conditions,
although some will be more favourable than others.104 The modern emergence
of democracy has helped to create conditions that are more conducive for
‘politics’ since representative democracy does institutionalise some elements
of the aforementioned spirit of revolution, but on their own these conditions
are far from sufficient and cannot be relied upon.
In order to distinguish literarity more clearly from Derridean différance, it
is necessary for Rancière to make explicit the function whereby this avail-
ability acts to disrupt. Hence in The Flesh of Words he suggests that literarity
is the ‘disordering peculiar to writing’.105 Literarity is both the disorder that
emerges from the availability of the word as well as the condition of avail-
ability. This disorder ‘confuses … hierarchy’ because it ‘introduces dis-
sonance’.106 This reveals a more explicit focus on the political as it identifies
what it is about this availability that can be wielded in such a way as to act
against order. ‘By confusing the destination of living speech’ such that it can
be read and interpreted by just about anybody ‘writing confuses this rela-
tionship between ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of speaking whose
harmony constitutes … the community’.107 This disordering of writing is
made possible by writing’s availability – the fact that there is an excess of
words and meanings. The emphasis on disorder indicates that availability of
meaning is necessary but not sufficient for literary disorder. Hence by the time
of writing The Politics of Aesthetics Rancière has concluded that literarity
comprises both the condition of the availability of meaning plus the disruptive
effect caused by this availability.108
The unique point that Rancière adds here is that in removing rules from
writing in literature, writing’s political impact – its potential to rupture –
which has always existed, has been released in particularly potent ways in the
modern age. Although writers seek to discipline this potential in various ways
throughout the democratic age109 they can never contain it completely. As
136 Poeticity
long as literature remains the dominant art of writing it will always have the
potential to contribute to democracy understood as moments of equality.
However, before we get swept away by the romantic notion that we can do
‘politics’ by writing novels and poetry Rancière urges caution. As noted
above, in ‘Literary Misunderstanding’ Rancière finally turns to theorise
explicitly the distinction between political disagreement (‘politics’) and lit-
erary misunderstanding.110 Having now understood that literarity is the dis-
ruption that comes from the availability of meaning, we can see that these
represent two divergent directions that this disruption can take.
Literary misunderstanding and political disagreement both work against
police order.111 Indeed, earlier Rancière asserts that literary misunderstanding
is a ‘miscount’112– a dispute about which things are important and should be
included and which should not. This is the exact word he uses in Dis-agreement
and elsewhere to describe the moment of ‘politics’.113. Yet ‘political disagree-
ment and literary misunderstanding each attack one aspect of the consensual
paradigm of proportions between words and things’114 and thus work toge-
ther from ‘different angles’.115 Whereas disagreement is about the invention of
the new – ‘names, utterances, arguments and demonstrations that set up new
collectives where anyone can get themselves counted in the count of the
uncounted’ – misunderstanding is that which suspends ‘the forms of indivi-
duality through which consensual logic binds bodies to meanings’116 such that
words can be used outside of their ‘correct’ meaning to create a particular
effect. Thus he summarises that ‘politics works on the whole, literature works
on the units’.117
Consequently, we see that the way in which literarity disrupts in formal
writing is different from how it disrupts outside of the discipline of formal
writing. Literarity can effect dissensus (rupture with given meanings) in lit-
erature due to literature’s indifference.118 It is this dissensus that Rancière
refers to as literary misunderstanding. This misunderstanding creates ‘new
forms of individuality that dismantle the correspondences established between
states of bodies and meanings’.119 Yet this dissensus that is peculiar to litera-
ture is limited with regard to its field of operation: the discipline of literature.
It can disrupt literature momentarily but is then absorbed into the discipline.
Indeed, in terms of the impact of literary misunderstanding for literature
Rancière notes that in order for such misunderstanding to operate it still
needs to maintain an idea of literature as a coherent whole. This means that
although it challenges the place of bodies and meanings within the whole it
cannot overthrow the need for there to be a coherent entity. As such, it is
enclosed in a field between two poles: on the one hand a drive to pure litera-
ture (as we find in Flaubert’s obsession with style); on the other the drive that
dissolves literature completely. This latter is effected via either gradual elim-
ination of words in the quest for real experiences below the words120 or via
the need to communicate reality through the words, which subsequently
undermines the words which are reduced to pale imitations of real things and
such no longer count as literature.121 Hence paradoxically this very
Poeticity 137
misunderstanding becomes a ground: its lawlessness is the law of literature. It
functions as a new principle of order rather than as a rupturing force.
Political dissensus works on the constitution of the field itself, rupturing its
constitution. It ‘operates in the form of subjectification procedures that identify
the declaration by the anonymous that they are a collective, an us, with
reconfiguration of the field of political objects and actors.’122 In contrast, literary
misunderstanding takes us in the ‘opposite direction’.123 Instead of organising
‘the perceptual field around the subject of utterance … it dissolves the subject
of utterance in the fabric of the percepts and affects of anonymous life’.124
Thus Rancière claims that literary misunderstanding actually opposes the sta-
ging of ‘politics’ with a different staging that invalidates ‘the markers of poli-
tical subjectification’.125 Hence he tells us that literature as a whole can never
effect ‘politics’. As long as writing is deemed to belong within a discipline
its literarity will operate as metapolitics.
At this point we can clarify the distinction made previously between Derrida
and Rancière concerning the relationship between literature and democracy.
Rancière accuses Derrida of sidestepping ‘politics’ but this is partially due to
Derrida’s misconceptualisation of politics as rooted in sovereignty rather
than, in Rancière’s reading, emerging via democracy. Furthermore, in his
later works the term literarity helps Rancière to articulate the relationship
between the availability of the word and democracy, and to reveal more pre-
cisely the role of literature in this respect. Rancière figures this relationship via
the use of another trope, that of an island which he suggests represents a
response to the fable of Theuth and the invention of writing. Rancière claims
that in narrative, the figure of the island is used to represent a place where
order is redistributed and its meaning inverted. Hence islands are portrayed
as mythical places of other lives, alternate orders, enchantment, seduction and
spells; the temptations that lure us away from the real world of order and sense.
In this respect he suggests that books themselves operate within our oligarchic
order as these islands, word-islands, whose ideas challenge and counter the
reigning order:
The island is not just the fiction within a book. It is the metaphor for the
book in general, for the book as a type of being. The space of the island
and the volume of the book express each other and thus define a certain
world, a certain way in which writing makes a world by unmaking
another one.126
In the democratic age, the new availability of the novel enabled ideas to cir-
culate and reach those who had no business reading and dreaming of other
ways of living: ‘these word-islands that silt across the channelled river of logos
are not content with troubling fragile souls. They re-carve the space that is
between bodies and that regulates their community.127
Yet they do this by positing as an eternal challenge the availability of another
community, that based on a claim to universal equality: the community that is
138 Poeticity
democracy.128 This is a community that can never be instituted and so we
see that it always exists, like the mirage of an island on the horizon, to motivate the
journey away from existing order, and to counter the order that we have. Ran-
cière acknowledges that the more common interpretation of an island
within literary theory is as a representation of utopia, yet he argues in contrast
that
it is first of all democracy whose representation the island symbolises.

Democracy is this ‘empty’, ‘abstract’ space that divides up the power of
the few words available: people, equality, liberty, etc. It is also the move-
ment by which these available words take hold of and divert from their
intended path people who had not been concerned with dealing with
logos or the community.129
Thus the island as a literary trope represents the rupture of political disagreement
rather than literary misunderstanding.
Literarity can lead to political disagreement which is democratic, or it can
lead to literary misunderstanding which need not be. This positions Rancière
at odds with Derrida’s claim: ‘No democracy without literature; no literature
without democracy.130 While institutionalised democracy and the institution
of literature as a certain type of writing without rules are interdependent, and
while democracy understood as the rupture of order does indeed need to
exploit the literarity of writing in order to break and refigure the bonds
between particular bodies and meanings, writing can disorder without effect-
ing this particular understanding of democracy. Hence when democracy is
conceived as rupture we must amend Derrida’s formula: no democracy
without literature, but quite feasibly, literature without democracy.
As with social movements in Chapter 1, the availability of meaning in
books, writing and its various interpretations can motivate a rupture but do
not constitute the rupture. They may be necessary but will not be sufficient for
‘politics’. Indeed, Rancière tells us that the ‘fixed gaze suspended over the
island’ reveals to us the suspense of literature between its two fates: that of its dis-
ciplinarity; and that of literarity which ruptures and reveals its drive to fix and
order.131 For this literarity to effect political disagreement it needs imaginaries
(figured by the island) to motivate it. Yet the gaze, looking beyond any particular
imaginary takes the unfolding of ‘politics’ beyond the story or idea that pro-
vided its original motivation. This emphasises that the existence and availability
of literature in the form of readily available novels and poetry as well as their
various interpretations may help to figure counter-imaginaries but are not suf-
ficient resource for ‘politics’ since any fragmentation they effect can too easily
be tucked back into the order of literature and neutered of their rupturing force.
Hence if literarity remains within the discipline of literature it can effect
fragmentation in the form of literary misunderstanding. However, outside of
the discipline it can effect politics. This is elaborated in Rancière’s essay on
Balzac where in trying to navigate the contradictory tendencies of literature’s
Poeticity 139
drive for mastery of the word and the disruption of literarity Balzac is ren-
dered unable to write. Instead, he becomes a hostage of democracy, the island
of the people, forcing him to turn to the material world in order to resolve his
story.132 Yet in his contribution to the building of a new poetics, Balzac also
alerts us to the overflow of meaning and ideas beyond words back into the
material existence from whence they have come. Here Rancière traces the path
of meaning, breaking away from where it has been captured by literature and
into the material existence of human lives. He notes the play of poetics in the
power of the mind which is already at work
in this humanity whose language is already a living poem but one that
speaks – in the stones it shapes, the objects it makes and the lines it cuts
in the land – a truer language than that of words. Truer because closer to
the power by which life is written.133
Indeed, writing is not limited here to mere marks on a page. It goes beyond
the paper and includes writing that is ‘inscribed on the very texture of
things’.134 It is the writing of materiality. It includes the ways in which we
interact with the material around us: the material distribution of things,
places, belonging, the way we accept or reject ways of being, saying and
doing. Writing is any act of inscription, of seeking to fix meaning in order to
communicate it between people. As Chambers notes above, Rancière is seek-
ing to disrupt much more radically the distinction between speech and writ-
ing, not merely noting that one should not be prioritised over the other, but
that they are not substantially different.135 Yet Chambers does not fully
develop the import of this step, for Rancière is not simply seeking to blur the
division between writing and speech but, like Derrida, to blur too the division
between writing, speech and thought. Thus Rancière sees the presence of
writing in all interactions between the human as well as between the human
with the non-human. In this sense, writing is the realm of meaning that seeks
always to fix our relations between each other and between humans and the
material, yet it can never succeed once and for all, due to the excess of
meaning. Literarity, as the force of disorder inherent in writing, is available
for us to exploit for political ends; it is the disorder inherent in any attempt to
fix, through the medium of meaning, the order of human relations with the
world around them.
At this point we are ready to reflect anew upon Rancière’s claim that
modern man is a literary animal before he is a political animal.136 This, he
tells us, is because man is ‘caught in the circuit of a literarity that undoes the
relationship between the order of words and the order of bodies that deter-
mine the place of each’.137 We can now understand that this is because man’s
literarity means that no one human or group of humans will ever have com-
plete mastery over inscription, or indeed over the meaning and use of lan-
guage. Literarity is not simply found in writing but in all forms of
communication. It is the excess of meaning and the disorder it effects which
140 Poeticity
can then be used to subvert order. In some ways this idea of writing that is
more than what is written functions as a form of utopia, but not a utopia in
the sense of a distant imaginary place but as a ‘heterotopia’;138 the potential
of democracy, the moment of equality, as a non-place of ‘a polemical recon-
figuration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories that define what
is considered to be obvious’.139 ‘Politics’ exists because man is an animal that
can express meaning and argue over whether others do or do not express
meaning. The existence of ‘politics’ is dependent on the ability of mankind to
communicate meaning at the same time as playing with meaning. Conse-
quently, writing and any form of communication can never simply be tools
for domination and will always offer the possibility of emancipation. Ever
since humans have been able to constitute speech and meaning ‘politics’ has
been available via the subversion of inscription. As all are equally implicated
within this140 the potential for democracy has always been with us. It is this
that Plato saw and sought to contain in the very first steps of Western philo-
sophy, codified by Aristotle in the formula that man is a political animal
because he possesses the logos. This fixed the logos as singular and achiev-
able. Thus, in dominant circles, until the dawning of the age of democracy the
foundation of the singular logos of natural order went unquestioned. Eman-
cipation in this sense refers to exploiting our literarity by playing with the
availability of meaning to strategically effect disorder in the form of a rup-
ture of meaning and sense in favour of equality, from which ‘politics’, the
challenge to the police, can occur.
Yet here another question arises. If Rancière wishes to claim that literarity
is the disorder inherent in the inscription of all meaning, not just the written
word, why did he have to take us all round the history of writing to get there?
Rancière has argued that writing includes a dangerous feature – literarity –
that was contained more securely, while writing was subordinated to speech.
When the aesthetic regime emerged this enabled writing to break free of this
position and also of its constraining rules and conventions so as to unleash
literarity and its fertile imaginaries to inspire stagings of equality. However,
this identifies the ways that literarity operates through writing and does not
mean that it operates only through writing.
Plato was particularly concerned about the dangers of writing due to his
particular context in which the ability to read and write was spreading and
hence writing as an institution needed to be regulated and contained by social
convention in the same way that speech and philosophy already were via the
division of labour (enter Aristotle). In analysing this Rancière is able to
identify the underlying concern about the way that the availability of language
in all its forms can undermine the order of the polis. Plato’s particular concern
with writing demonstrates how the materiality of communicative strategies is
always going to interact with literarity to impact on conditions of possibility
as noted by Davis who observes that the errancy of speech, and hence its lit-
erary potential, has been enhanced by the development of recording and
video technology.141
Poeticity 141
Hence Rancière focuses on using writing to demonstrate literarity (the
errancy of the letter through all inscription and re-inscription of meaning) for
political disagreement. By focusing on the example of writing, Rancière is
able to weave into his narrative analysis of how the discipline of writing –
literature – became less disciplined in the democratic age and outline the way
that writing came to be more available as a tool of ‘politics’ in the sense of
freeing it from the constraints by which it had been bound.
Poeticity as play with meaning

Yet this clarification has afforded us only a moment’s pause for there is one
more area which we must visit before we can reconsider what Rancière’s lit-
erary theory offers our investigation into his ‘politics’. Early in his study of
the poetics of literature, Rancière introduces the principle of poeticity to
explain that the revolution in writing that marked the birth of literature was a
revolution concerning the way poetry was understood to express meaning.
Following Vico, he notes that in the representative regime, poetry was merely
‘an activity that produces poems’ yet in the aesthetic regime poetry ‘is the
quality of poetic objects.’142 The removal of rules for writing that we see in
the new literature meant that the poeticity of the world could be expressed in
formal writing whereby poeticity refers to
the property by which any object can be doubled, taken not only as a set
of properties but as the manifestation of an essence, not only as the effect of
certain causes but as the metaphor or metonymy of the power that
produces it.143
For Victor Hugo, the stone of the cathedral is no longer simply limited to the
properties of the stone for this stone can now ‘also be language’ – the lan-
guage that is written in every object of the world.144 Again Rancière is not
claiming that metaphor or metonymy never existed before this moment, but
that they were afforded a new ‘legitimate’ status that provided the new ground
of formal writing – the ground of literature.145
This legitimation of metaphor is a symptom of the wider democratic shift
in the modern era. This shift is the reason why Rancière qualifies that it is
modern man who is a literary animal.146 The legitimacy given to the lack of
rules in literature makes it available as a paradoxical discipline which can
provoke ‘politics’. Man has always been a discursive animal, one that creates
and recreates the logos at the same time as living in accordance with it. Yet
the values of the democratic era loosen the hold of convention over language
and its uses thereby rendering the power of words to make and remake the
world in which we live more available. Accordingly, in such a world it
becomes even more fitting to describe man as a literary animal.
We need not stop there, however. Although poeticity is that which is now
enshrined as the basis of literature, its reach goes further. Rancière cites Vico
142 Poeticity
to suggest that poetry is the meeting of language and thought, the first
expressions of emerging consciousness. In the roots of poetry we find the
meanings of speech, words and ideas, myths and the logos (the right, the true)
all tangled up together.147 Poetry is the arena in which the new emerges in
thought and speech
is a language that speaks of things ‘as they are’ for someone awakening to
language and thought. It speaks of things as he sees them and speaks of

them. And he cannot help but see them and speak of them. It is the
necessary union between speech and thought, between knowledge and
ignorance.148
In poetry we find that fiction is not so separate from fact, for the first fact was
only fiction of sorts: a supposition. Yet this was defended as true, a myth
defended as history. Thus the idea becomes the logos, the fixed word, the true.
Logos emerges from poetry and will be challenged again by poetry. Poetry
emerges from the ‘first impotence of a thought incapable of abstraction and
an inarticulate language’149 and is thus duplicitous150 for it is not only the
establishment of truth, the telling of the world, but is also the subsequent
challenging of this truth with others. Poetry is therefore ‘one particular man-
ifestation of the poeticity of the world, that is, of the way in which a truth is
given to a collective consciousness in the form of works and institutions’.151
As the language of the new, poetry ‘is defined by poeticity’, by the way that
words and meaning can be doubled and such it is ‘a state of language, a
specific way that thought and language belong to one another, a relation
between what the one knows and does not know and the other says and does
not say’.152
The challenging of truth brought about by the telling and retelling of the
world through poetry, rooted in the Ancient Greek word poiesis (to make or
create), is only possible because of the principle of poeticity, the doubling of
meaning which is this setting of a word against itself via metaphor and
metonymy. Thus Rancière dissolves the ancient debate between poetry and
philosophy. Philosophy’s claim to truth is shown to be a sham: it is a form of
poetry dressed in the garb of ‘reason’. Because of poetry, the power of end-
lessly reworking the way we seek (and can never fully succeed so endlessly
continue to try) to communicate being wanders outside the realm of text and
is seen to ‘cover with its very power of errancy the experience of the whole
world’.153 The power of disruption – literarity – in the disorder of meaning
available to anybody to read, write and interpret as they will, can be seen
beyond writing in the realm of how we comprehend, inscribe and use words
and meanings in the whole of our social existence. There is a veiled practice of
poeticity at work in everyday communication because all communication
necessarily comprises an element of creativity, yet this is veiled by our every-
day adherence to ordinary conventions of language. Literarity is present in all
forms of communication. However, it will always be stifled by the linguistic
Poeticity 143
conventions that enable efficient communication. Poeticity is the practice
through which our literarity is exploited. It is that which facilitates the dou-
bling of meaning whereby the logos is split-able. Poeticity takes us back to
Aristotle once again, and underlines Rancière’s argument in Dis-agreement that
our political nature, our political existence as beings that have the logos,
depends on our prior ability to constitute and reconstitute the logos in a
political struggle. This constituting and reconstituting requires us to be less

respectful of linguistic convention and hence a practice of poeticity can be
identified here to denote a practice of playing with language without a neces-
sary intention, to undermine and draw attention to our usual unquestioning
adherence to linguistic convention.
In Dis-agreement Rancière further articulates the link between poetry and
‘politics’ in his short critique of the wrong turn taken by contemporary liberal
political theory. He insists that we need to revisit the dominant thematisation
of political dialogue or political ‘rationality’ which maps out the terrain of
political speech in contemporary political thought. This comprises two
exclusionary poles: first, that of rational speech, of the kind we find in liberal
analytic and Habermasian thought;154 and second, that of irrational violence
that takes us beyond the political sphere. In addition to these, Rancière sug-
gests that in order to understand political struggle it is necessary to recognise
an alternative option whereby voices struggle to make themselves heard and
understood through the political manoeuvrings that take us to the moment of
‘politics’. This is a moment when the rational, logical, accepted order of
speech is overturned in order to redistribute ‘the way speaking bodies are
distributed in an articulation between the order of saying, the order of doing,
and the order of being’.155 Yet Rancière is not suggesting that political speech
can be located somewhere between the two poles of rational speech and irra-
tional violence but that ‘politics’ is beyond this binary and concerns that
which identifies which forms of speech and action belong to either.
Accordingly, we must reject Habermas’s distinction between two kinds of
linguistic act: poetic versus argumentative; thus deigning argumentative
speech the legitimate form of rational speech and poetic as non-political. This
is because for Habermas the poetic leads us too far away from the everyday
needs of ‘politics’, opening up the world. In contrast argumentative speech
closes the world in and leads to a decision.156 Yet political speech is ‘always
both argument and opening up the world where argument can be received and
have an impact’ for this is argument that is about ‘the very existence of such a
world’ about the existence of a common stage before we can get onto the
stage and order it again (policification).157 In such a moment there can be no
distinction between the language of rational argument and poetic language
since such speech is at one and the same time both rational argument and
‘poetic’ metaphor158 (and hence there can be no final distinction between
rational speech and irrational speech since at any one time what is considered
rational to one grouping may be considered irrational to others). This is
because in a moment of ‘politics’ ‘it is necessary to simultaneously produce
144 Poeticity
both the argument and the situation in which it is to be understood, the
object of the discussion and the world in which it features as an object’.159
The moment of ‘politics’ constructs its stage at the same time as arguing on it. It
is comprised of language that is at one and the same time poetic (building new
worlds, revealing new ideas in speech) and argumentative (seeking to persuade
within the logos to break open the logos). Political communication is for
Rancière that which practices poeticity in order to break open the logos of
rational order and make space for the emergence of an alternative poetics.
We must therefore reject Habermasian typologies of what is and is not
appropriate speech for ‘politics’ and instead focus on the very ways in which we
construct that which is recognised as rational and irrational, poetic and argu-
mentative, thereby challenging a given ordering. This can be effected by practi-
cing poeticity: playing with the doubling of meaning to loosen our commitment
to language rules and bring into focus possible opportunities for literarity.
In the discussion above we saw this poetic doubling at work in various
political slogans. There it was claimed that a slogan ‘asserts a “we” of a
divided people’.160 Yet crucial to understanding this point is Rancière’s claim
that ‘[t]he proletarian class in which Blanqui professes to line himself up is in
no way identifiable with the social group’.161 It did not denote an identifiable
homogenous culture or ethos, but instead was fractured by a multiplicity of
voices, identities and experiences. Hence Blanqui’s use of the term ‘proletar-
ian’ did not draw up the line of battle between two already existing identities.
It introduced a pejorative and denied name, not clearly identifiable with any
existing party, smack down onto a society that denied it existed. Hence ‘in the
particular name of a specific part or of the whole of the community’ this
‘class’ ‘inscribe[d] the wrong that separates and reunites two heterogenous
logics of the community’,162 by refusing to acknowledge the given legitimate
partitioning of that order and thereby rupturing its legitimacy.
In considering the effect of this slogan we can note that ‘We are the 99%’
does proffer a new grouping, comprised of multiple voices, not identifiable
with already existing classes (e.g. working class or middle class), or a distinct
ethos or culture; it is also clearly identifiable within the existing order as a
label that names the vast swathe of the population. Nevertheless, it is neither
a pejorative term in the way that un-Australian, hooligan or German Jew
was, nor a term that denotes those who have no legitimate democratic claim
in our current order. Furthermore, it is perhaps rather too easily identifiable
as a part of society, a statistical grouping of the majority. When used by
occupiers who clearly were not numerically ‘the 99%’ it does assert a wrong
term, a challenge to the order, but one that seemed to be written off fairly
quickly as they were perceived by many to replicate the logic of representative
democracy and simply to claim to represent ‘the 99%’. Interestingly, when
David Graeber recounts the story of choosing this slogan there is no talk of
choosing a pejorative term that identifies those who had no legitimate claim
to it. Instead, the aim was to name the facts of the dispute, to identify that 1
per cent of the world’s population control the wealth and fortunes of the
Poeticity 145
163
remaining 99 per cent. Hence although the slogan can in some senses double
the people, identify a new grouping that is not representable in our current con-
figuration, and bring together a multiplicity of voices it has perhaps also too
easily reproduced consensus logic which seeks to name that which is, with
nothing left over. Ninety-nine per cent can too easily be added to 1 per cent
to create the whole, and in this sense the slogan does not cause confusion, or
stage a miscount.
In addition, the slogan did not easily seem to create a single state in which
‘you include your enemy’ in order to blur and render nonsensical the existing
division between the included and the excluded.164 This too is where Dean’s
reading runs aground for she emphasises the need to name division between
parties (already existing classes) rather than a division between two worlds:165
a world in which the 1 per cent rule the 99 per cent, and a world that may
seem nonsensical by today’s standards for it would be a world in which that
distinction would no longer exist. Before we get carried away with this ana-
lysis, however, Rancière has noted that once a ‘collective intelligence affirms
itself in the movement it is the moment of doing away with any philosophical
providers of explanations or slogans’.166 In spite of this assertion he evidently
does see a role for analysing slogans as this is the task he undertakes in What
Does it Mean to Be Un? in which he asserts that ‘there is a poetics of politics
which consists in inventing cases of dissensus’.167 It is not my intention here
to make suggestions, merely to note the features of literarity in the examples
Rancière provides and to discuss the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ in order to
bring into focus considerations of the practice of the poetics of politics.
This chapter has sought to clarify Rancière’s work on the politics of lan-
guage to enable us to draw out a practice of poeticity that could be used to
support democratic activism today by undermining our conformity with our
everyday ways of saying. Building on the focus on language herein, Chapter 5
will consider poeticity in action, beyond the linguistic. In doing so it will
consider the role of the subversive subject in Rancière’s work and reflect fur-
ther on the relationship between subversive behaviour and everyday life to
consider how everyday action can be used to create conditions for ‘politics’ by
subverting and rupturing our everyday ways of doing.
Notes
1 Derrida (1995: 28).
2 Rancière (2004b: 110).
3 Rancière (1999: 59).
4 Ibid.: 59, 200, 560–561.
5 Ibid.: 37, Rancière (2007a: 565–566).
7 Ibid.: 560.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
146 Poeticity
11 Ibid.: 561.
12 Dean (2011: 88).
13 Rancière (1999: 38).
14 Ibid.
15 Rancière (2007a: 564).
16 Rancière (1999: 39).
17 Dean (2011: 88, italics added).
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Dean (2012a: 218).
21 Rancière and Panagia (2000: 115).
22 See, for example, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1988).
23 Derrida uses this argument to suggest that this reveals a logocentrism in Western
metaphysics that prioritises presences over absence – the speaker is there in the
speech act, but is absent – as is the writer – in the written account (See ‘Plato’s
Pharmacy’ in Derrida 1981).
24 Davis (2010: 103).
25 Rancière’s notion of ‘regime’ clearly shares much with Foucault’s notion of
episteme.
26 Rancière (2011d: 49).
27 Ibid.: 44.
28 Ibid.: 73.
29 Ibid.: 45–48.
30 Ibid.: 48.
31 Ibid.: 50.
32 Davis (2010: 107).
33 Rancière (2011d: 94).
34 See Derrida (1995) on the same point.
35 ‘Phaedrus’ in Plato (1977: 275e).
36 From The Names of History in 1992, Dis-agreement (1995), and Mute Speech
(1998). It was developed a little more in The Flesh of Words (also 1998), elabo-
rated in two interviews carried out in 2000 (one conducted with Davide Panagia
and the other with Solange Guenon et al.) and then summed up in The Politics
of Aesthetics (2004). The dates shown here are for the original French publica-
tion of these works.
37 Cf. initial usage in Rancière (1992: 108, 1995: 61, 2010e: 83, 1998b: 126, then
2000a: 115 and finally 2000b: 8).
38 Rancière (2004c: 39).
39 Although The Names of History was translated in 1994 only two years after its
publication in French, it was followed, albeit rather late, by Dis-agreement which
appeared in English in 1999. Following the popularity of Dis-agreement the two
aforementioned interviews were immediately available via English-language
journals in 2000, whereas we had to wait until 2004 for the English editions of
The Politics of Aesthetics and The Flesh of Words despite the latter text having
been published in French in 1998. Finally, Mute Speech, which also appeared in
French in 1998, only became available in 2011.
40 See Davis (2010: 109–110) on this, and comments in Guenon et al. (2000). I have
chosen to use the term literarity in this chapter on the basis that its English form
differs less from the French original.
41 At least until 2011 when the English edition of Mute Speech appeared.
42 Ross (2010: 136); and Chambers (2013: 114).
43 Kollias (2007), Davis (2010).
44 Rockhill (2004).
45 Chambers (2013) and Ross (2010).
Poeticity 147
46 Robson (2009).
47 Davis (2010).
48 Chambers (2013).
49 Davis (2010: 108).
50 Ibid.: 109.
51 Ibid.: 114.
52 Chambers (2013: 89).
53 Ibid.: 113.
54 Rancière (1991: 64).

55 Chambers (2013: 114).
56 See Rancière (1981: 64).
57 Chambers (2013: 114).
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.: 115.
61 Rancière and Panagia (2000: 115, italics in the original); cited by Chambers
(2013: 116).
62 Chambers (2013: 116).
63 Ibid.: 117.
64 Davis (2010: 114).
65 This is not to overlook individuals who are physically unable to speak or hear
but that it is not dependent on social factors such as access to education. See
also Rancière’s comments on ability in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991).
66 Chambers (2013: 113).
67 See, for example, Rancière (1999: 1 and 1998b: 42).
69 Rancière (1983: 45). Unlike Andrew Parker I do not take theotocracy to be a
precursor to the concept of literarity but instead as a more general term referring
to all arts, not just writing.
70 Rancière (2004c: 88).
71 At this point it is important to clarify that for Rancière there is no pre-existing
human subject that could use poetics to construct knowledge but, as shown in
Chapter 1, the subject itself is formed via the practice of poetics – the phrase
‘poetics of knowledge’ then emphasises how human creativity shapes knowledge
including the knowledge of ‘who’ the human subject might be (See discussion of
Vico’s work on the origins of poetry in Rancière 2011d: Ch. 2). I will focus in
more detail on Rancière’s theory of subjectivity in Chapter 5.
72 1991.
73 Such a reading is supported by Rancière’s comments in Guenon et al. (2000: 3).
74 Obvious parallels with Foucault will be laid aside here but are discussed in more
detail in Chapter 5.
76 Rancière (1998a, 1998b).
77 Plato (1997: 700e/701a).
78 Rancière (1983: 40).
79 Which Socrates describes as ‘a special kind of music’ (Phaedrus, 259c) implying a
type of harmoniousness that is directly challenged by the absurdist tradition as
discussed in Chapter 5.
80 Phaedrus, 259a-b.
81 Rancière (1983: 47–51).
82 Prioritising of speech over language.
83 Prioritising of physical presence (of speaker) for reason over absence.
84 Derrida (1995).
85 Bell (2004: 132).
148 Poeticity
88 Rancière (1992: 52).
90 See Rancière (2009c, 2010b).
92 Derrida (1995, 2004).
93 See Chapter 2.
94 Rancière (2011d: 95).

95 Ibid.
96 Davis (2010: 115) and Rockhill (2004: 71–72). Although Rockhill suggests that it
emerges due to Rancière’s dependence on two contradictory tendencies, at times
situating his take on the different regimes of art within the neo-Kantian histor-
ical transcendentalism often associated with Foucault (see Rancière 2004c: 9–10),
while at other times seeming to take ‘his regimes of art as immanent conditions
that only exist in actual historical configurations’ (Rockhill 2004: 71–72). He
suggests that it would make sense for Rancière simply to abandon the neo-Kantian
tendency found in his account of the historical symptoms that contribute to the
emergence of each historical regime (ibid.: 74).
97 In Dis-agreement (1999), discussed in Chapter 1.
98 Rancière (2011d, 2004b).
100 Rancière (2011c: 21).
101 Ibid.
102 Rancière (2004b: 103).
103 Rancière (2011c: Ch. 2).
104 In Dis-agreement Rancière does suggest that it is modern man that is a literary
animal before he is a political animal; however, I take this to refer to his
explaining how the force of literarity has been unleashed via the democratic age
and is therefore more available through the democratic revolution, not that it did
not exist beforehand (1999: 37).
105 Rancière (2004b: 103, italics added).
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.
108 To clarify a little more, in Dissenting Words Rancière says that ‘literarity refers at
once to ‘the excess of words’ that ‘disrupts the relation between an order of dis-
course and its social function’ and is thus excess of words in three senses: first,
that which he elsewhere denotes literariness – ‘words available in relation to the
thing to be named’, but second and simultaneously to this, the excess ‘relating to
the requirements for the production of life’; and third, ‘vis-à-vis the modes of
communication that function to legitimate the “proper” itself ’ (Rancière and
Panagia 2000: 115).
109 See his essays on Flaubert, Balzac, Proust and Mallarmé.
110 Rancière (2011c: 41).
111 ‘Actually makes itself felt to the detriment of the same paradigm of order as
political disagreement’ (ibid).
112 Ibid.: 36.
113 Rancière (1999: 10).
114 Rancière (2011c: 41).
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Rancière (2004c: 15).
119 Rancière (2011c: 41–42).
Poeticity 149
120 As in Balzac (Rancière 2004b: 111).
121 As in Proust (Rancière 2011c: 43).
122 Ibid,
123 Ibid.
125 Ibid.: 44.
126 Rancière (2004b: 100).
127 Ibid.: 103–104.
128 Ibid.: 104.

129 Ibid.: 104–105, italics in the original.
130 Derrida (1995: 28).
131 Rancière (2004b: 110).
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.: 110.
134 Ibid.: 106–107.
135 Chambers (2013: 116).
136 Rancière (1999: 37).
137 Translation amended by the author; Rancière (1999: 39).
138 Rancière (2004c: 41).
139 Ibid.: 40.
140 Not equally able by any particular measure, but all are implicated to greater and
lesser extents in different ways and thus the argument about which measure is the
best to use becomes possible.
141 Davis (2010: 108).
142 Rancière (2011d: 59).
143 Ibid.: 60.
144 Ibid.
145 Literature occupies the space between the two poles of poeticity and naked
writing, ibid.: 171–172.
146 Rancière (1999: 37).
147 Rancière (2011d: 58).
148 Ibid.: 57.
149 Ibid.: 58.
150 Ibid.: 59.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid.
153 Kollias (2007: 85).
154 Public reasonableness in Rawls (1997) and rational speech in Habermas (1985).
155 Rancière (1999: 55).
156 Ibid.: 56.
158 Ibid.
159 Ibid.: 57.
160 Dean (2011: 88), italics added.
161 Rancière (1999: 38).
162 Ibid.: 39.
163 Graeber (2013: 37–41).
164 Rancière and Lie (2006: n.p.).
165 Rancière (1999: 42).
166 Rancière (2012b: n.p.).
167 Rancière (2007a: 561).
5 Absurdity
Aesthetics of subversion
No freedom without dwarves.

(The Orange Alternative1)
[T]he question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a

matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation.
(Judith Butler2)
Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the

demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself.
As the communist regime struggled to maintain power in 1980s Poland,

political graffiti was commonplace but short term. Any scrawled expression of
dissent or protest would vanish soon after it appeared, covered over with
almost supernatural speed by hurried splashes of paint that neutralised its
message. However, in August 1982 in an even more mysterious fashion,
gnomes began to appear, dancing and strolling their way across these hastily
painted coverings. The casual, ‘apolitical’ pointy-hatted stick men seemed
oblivious to their precarious location in the midst of a political dispute. Nor
did they have anything to say about it. They just appeared. Then of course,
the government functionaries had to be despatched once more to attend to
the urgent business of painting over gnomes.
Since the late 1990s Rancière’s work has taken a more explicitly aesthetic
turn, observable in his introduction of a new phrase for the police order as a
‘distribution of the sensible’.4 Although the introduction of this phrase has
gone unremarked in earlier chapters it is salient to flag it up at this point in
our discussion because it was introduced to articulate more precisely the
particular way that police logic defines and legitimates the appropriate dis-
tribution of the social. Through this shift to the terminology of the ‘sensible’
Rancière signals the centrality of aesthetics for his conceptualisation of the
‘politics’/police framework. He tells us that the distribution of the sensible
refers to a ‘generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first
defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed’.5 Accordingly,
Absurdity 151
the essence of the police is a distribution ‘characterised by the absence of void
or supplement’ such that all identities are tied to particular ways of doing,
saying and being in particular specified locations.6 In contrast, the ‘essence of
politics is dissensus’ which he now describes as a ‘demonstration of a gap in
the sensible itself ’.7 As we have seen in the previous chapters, ‘politics’ ‘before
all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable’.8 ‘Politics’ operates
according to dissensus, which is the break in the order of the sensible, allow-
ing us to recognise that the rupture of ‘politics’ is that which ushers in a
reconfiguration of our sensory perceptions.
While Chapters 3 and 4 elaborated practices that could help to weaken our
attachment to ways of doing and saying, this final chapter will turn to con-
sider how we might conceive of practices that challenge our very ways of
being. Following on from the previous chapter’s discussion of poeticity, it will
expand the argument beyond the linguistic field to consider poeticity in the
more general sense of the poeticity of being. It will begin by questioning the
availability of Rancière’s conceptualisation of ‘politics’ as dissensus, raising
the concern that this does not acknowledge the ways in which our perceptions
are regulated and disciplined to shut down and oppose dissensus. It will sug-
gest that the tradition of the absurd may be able to inspire ways of under-
mining this regulation, but in order to do so effectively, it needs to be
liberated from its location within performance to recognise our everyday lives
as performative. It will thus be argued that Butler’s theorisation of perfor-
mativity through iteration can be used to supplement the theorisation of
‘politics’ as dissensus. In order to make this argument, however, it is necessary
to trace the differences between these two thinkers on the topic of sub-
jectivation, which will enable us to think more carefully about the subject of
subversion. Thus we will conclude that absurdity can provide us with the final
democratic practice of this book, a practice that exploits the poeticity of
being to undermine and challenge our everyday adherence to any sensible
distribution.
Senses of absurdity
We return, then, to Rancière’s mapping of the aesthetic as an order of the
sensible ruptured by dissensus. Rancière’s depiction would benefit from a
further acknowledgement of the way that the order of the sensible is that
which regulates the distinction between sense and nonsense. This provides an
important insight given that the term nonsense denotes that which is com-
monly understood to lack not only sense, but to therefore lack value, and
consequently does not require suppression for it can simply be disregarded as
laughable or silly. The existence of nonsense reminds us that even that which
is seen to lack sense or contradict the logos occupies a place within order, but
it is a subordinate place, as that which does not adhere to the logos. It is thus
foolish or inconsequential. Hence the failure to conform to order can be
interpreted as either a threat (an alternative form of sense) to be suppressed or
152 Absurdity
as nonsense to be disregarded. However, in both situations this failure to
conform should not be assumed to result in exclusion beyond borders of
order, or to provide the possibility of a free space within, for instead it could
simply render one subordinate. As Rancière indicates, the only way to avoid
this is to block the workings of the underlying logic so as to rupture this
system entirely via dissensus. This has significant consequence for ‘politics’
since if Rosa Parks’ protest had been rendered nonsensical its political import
could have been neutralised.
This example helps us to consider the concerns outlined in Chapter 1 con-
cerning the efficacy of ‘politics’ from the perspective of aesthetics. Appro-
priation, dis-identification and subjectivation bring together elements that are
neither wholly sensible nor nonsensical, but are instead a strategic mixture of
both which ensures that, at least momentarily, they cannot be categorised.
Dissensus is that which momentarily breaks with the sensible order, not as
nonsense, but as a break with these normative categorisations. This prompts
us to recall that ‘politics’ functions not by challenging one logic with another
but by utilising a counter-logic to scramble the sensible order. Hence any
counter-logic causes ‘politics’ not by its content but by momentarily present-
ing us with a paradox9 of how to proceed. In the moment of ‘politics’ the
logic of the sensible order is rendered incapable, unable to categorise and
situate effectively and thus is incapable of making sense of the dissensus. This
forces change in the order.
It was argued in Chapter 1 that the more we adhere to legitimate and
expected ways of being, doing and saying, the more we contribute to the
everyday operating of the police order. Practices that loosen our commitment
to these ways of being, doing and saying therefore undermine the entrenching
of the police, weakening its hold and making it more likely that unforeseen
ruptures may appear. The possibility of dissensus emerges from a conceptual
space that is neither sensible nor non-sensible, but cannot be placed or made
sense of. With respect to Rancière’s discussion of the account made of speech
in Dis-agreement, no account can easily be made of it. This indicates that we
require another term to denote this conceptually, to denote that which func-
tions to rupture more than construct, the a-logical rather than the illogical:
that which lacks its own meaning and hence cannot simply be belittled and
denigrated and could possible even retain a lingering sense of mystery or
strangeness. Although any way of rendering this in language will necessarily
be imperfect one potential option that is worth exploring is absurdity in ways
of doing. Although also seen to have nonsensical and comical associations
absurdity cannot be reduced to refer only to the comical, the foolish and
hence at least to some extent can be seen to avoid normative sensory
categorisations.
Calling for a practice of absurdity and playfulness could open this book to
many humorous critiques and disparaging comments yet the use of the term
is appropriate both etymologically and conceptually. With regards to etymol-
ogy, it is formed of two parts, the prefix ‘ab’ which denotes divergence from
Absurdity 153
that which follows it (originally denoting ‘away from’), and ‘surdus’ the Latin
for deaf. It was initially used to refer to a lack of harmony, a dissonant racket
that could not be made sense of. This is congruent with my purposes here in
two ways. First, it invokes Rancière’s claim that speech beyond the logos is
merely noise. It cannot be recognised as speech and therefore its speakers are
not recognised as equals or even as human. A noisy din is one thing, but a
window can always be closed on a protest below and quiet restored to a

room. To use the term absurd to refer to such a disruption denotes a possible
political meaning that circumvents this example for this din is one in which
deafness is not a possible response. The opposite of deafness is hearing, even
when it hurts to hear. Hence absurd refers to a din that is heard but not made
sense of within the existing frames of reference.10 A practice of absurdity
means repeating actions that do not make sense and are not acceptable within
the normative order but regardless of this cannot be ignored. Second, practice
of this lack of harmony in support of democracy is particularly salient given
the consideration below of the intersections between Rancière and Butler
since Butler has recently referred to democracy as the creation of dis-
sonance.11 Accordingly, my usage of the notion of absurdity is not to render
its practice as ridiculous in a normative sense, such that it can be reduced and
belittled. Instead, it simply denotes that which is without meaning,12 and
‘devoid of purpose’.13 The analogy with dissonance points towards us con-
ceiving of absurdity as a democratic practice, a practice of seeking out that
which is neither sensible nor non-sensible, thereby creating conditions under
which ‘politics’ may be more likely.
In conceptual terms the claim that absurdity is politically significant is not
new. Indeed, there is already a rich tradition in which the absurd is acknowl-
edged to have been philosophically, politically and socially valuable since the
comedies of Aristophanes or even before.14 In particular, the term absurd was
introduced into modern philosophical thought in the work of Søren Kierke-
gaard who asserted that far from being nonsense, the absurd is actually the
form taken by an extreme paradox: that which can neither be understood, nor
solved by reason. However, in such instances reason ‘has no power over the
paradox’, it is ‘in no position to judge it to be nonsense, simply to dismiss it
as necessarily false’.15 This is because inasmuch as reason reflects on its own
limits it has to conceive of paradox as that which it cannot master, as that
which proves its own finitude. This enabled Kierkegaard to argue that since
reason is opposed to religious faith, to have such faith was absurd. Yet it is
this feature of it that means that it should be celebrated since it proves the
superior status of faith as that which takes us beyond human understanding.16
We do not need to follow Kierkegaard’s use of the absurd in defence of reli-
gious faith in order to appreciate the claim that absurdity is absolute paradox
over which reason holds no power. This accords with our purposes here since
Rancière has already told us that ‘politics’ effects just such a paradox. It poses
a question that cannot be resolved within the current configuration of order.
Hence police logic does not know how to respond: it can neither comprehend
154 Absurdity
nor dismiss it. Thus, we see that the effectivity of ‘politics’ arises due to it
occuring within the parameters of the absurd.
After his death Kierkegaard’s work was revived in early twentieth-century
France, inspiring the development of French existentialism. Most famously,
the writings of Albert Camus popularised the philosophy of the absurd in the
1940s and 1950s. In contrast to what he saw as Kierkegaard’s retreat into
nihilism Camus utilised the absurd as a philosophical position and metaphy-

sical claim.17 Metaphysically it described man’s desire for meaning despite the
lack of possibility of any ultimate meaning, and philosophically it thus staged
a confrontation that posed a challenge to human beings to construct their
own meaning and purpose for life, coming to find meaning and happiness in
the search itself. Despite the requirement that ‘politics’ eschew both meta-
physical and philosophical content, we can extract from Camus the commit-
ment to absurdity, not as a metaphysical necessity, but simply as a democratic
practice. This then poses a further question for us regarding what such a
practice would comprise.
Camus’s absurd was a major influence on the flourishing of the tradition of
the absurd in the theatre movement of the same name in the 1960s, and the
ensuing traditions of performance art and political protest. Although not a
self-proclaimed movement, the Theatre of the Absurd comprised theatrical
works from the late 1950s and 1960s that were strongly influenced by exis-
tentialism as well as elements of absurdity in the tradition of the arts more
generally, including, but in no way limited to, the comedic tradition in Aris-
tophanes through Shakespeare, folk theatre, puppetry, Commedia dell’arte,
pataphysics, Dadaism and Brecht’s epic theatre. Given that this movement is
widely recognised to have synthesised all of these influences it can prove a
helpful resource, providing us with a useful location from which we can
identify the key features of absurdity.
It is notable that over time the Theatre of the Absurd developed an
increasingly distinct position on absurdity that rejected Camus’s philosophical
stance. Like existentialism it saw humanity as cast adrift in a world of con-
tingency and uncertainty, yet it responded to this uncertainty in a markedly
different manner concerning both what it sought to communicate and its
method of communication: first, the Theatre of the Absurd accepted the
postmodern political premise that there are no longer any given truths, such
that plays cannot communicate an ultimate reality and instead can merely
‘present, in anxiety or with derision, an individual human being’s intuition of
the ultimate realities as he experiences them; the fruits of one man’s descent
into the depths of his personality, his dreams, fantasies and nightmares’.18
Thus these plays seek not to communicate certain information about how the
audience should act or respond, but merely to present the subject’s basic
situation.19 Second, although Camus and the wider existentialist movement
also sought to treat this subject, their approach was to use theatre to propose
a path for others to follow, presenting their ideas in a rational manner whe-
ther in philosophical or theatrical form, via ‘lucid reasoning and discursive
Absurdity 155
20
thought.’ In contrast, the Theatre of the Absurd can be distinguished by its
attempt to go ‘a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic
assumptions and the form in which these are expressed’21 such that the manner
in which the ideas are presented is at one with the underlying premise – that
there is no underlying truth to be communicated. Hence the aim was more to
embody absurdity as a way of communicating the absurd, rather than to seek
to communicate it via rational forms.
From theatre to the streets

Turning now to the ways in which the Theatre of the Absurd demonstrates
the practice of absurdity Martin Esslin’s still unrivalled work in this area
identifies four features: pure theatre, which refers to the utilisation of abstract
effects without providing an explanation; clowning; verbal nonsense; and
appreciation of dream and fantasy.22 These features all foreground the con-
tingency of our current world. In pure theatre, we see the contingency of
communication, the possibility of communicating without language or preci-
sion; clowning, as a form of playfulness demonstrates awareness and scrutiny
of the everyday, looking afresh at the ordinary. Chapter 4 has already ana-
lysed the significance of linguistic play in relaxing the hold of meaning. Thus
verbal nonsense operates at the edges of our understanding, bursting ‘the
bounds of logic’.23 Finally, the language of dreams allows the imagination
to run beyond the possible in order to posit the strange, the wonderful and
the non-real. In this way, dreams and fantasy sequences provide space to
ponder the space between what is and is not possible, posit alternatives and
paint the futures we might rather live. Consequently, the tradition of absurdist
theatre helps us to identify four ways in which absurdity can be practised to
create conditions under which dissensus may be more likely to emerge.
Furthermore, these practices enable absurdity to undermine aforemen-
tioned forms of domination effected through language and the division of
knowledge. First, the Theatre of the Absurd tries to circumvent language,
communicating instead through actions which, if not performed in silence,
often contradict the words being spoken.24 Hence it can be seen to seek to
challenge Western phonocentrism, our ‘reverence for the written or spoken
word’ in the way that it recognises ‘the limitations of logic and discursive
language acknowledging the uses of poetic language’ in its place.25 Moreover,
because playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus seeking to avoid
presenting a simple message of how to behave or respond it does not seek to
be interpreted: ‘[i]nstead of being provided with a solution, the spectator is
challenged to formulate the questions that he will have to ask if he wants to
approach the meaning of the play’.26 As such we could suggest that it is
designed to prompt aversion, to prompt the asking of questions, the revisiting
of the ordinary from a new perspective. Consequently, the playwright’s role is
consciously transformed from a position of leadership and knowledge to one
of a reporter of experiences: ‘a playwright simply writes plays, in which he
156 Absurdity
can offer only a testimony, not a didactic message’.27 The playwright’s aim is
thus to break down language highlighting that, due to the impossibility of
semantic closure, it is always impossible to make oneself fully understood.
However, as long as it remains in a theatre setting the emancipatory
potential of absurdity remains limited due to the interrelation of three factors:
communication, subjectivation and institutionalisation. With regard to com-
munication there are questions to be asked about the division of knowledge

and pure theatre. First, there is a risk that the move towards ‘pure’ theatre
can perpetuate the binary of linguistic and the extralinguistic, failing to
acknowledge the continuum between them that was discussed at the end of
the previous chapter. By removing language completely the Theatre of the
Absurd risks the implication that pure action can communicate what lan-
guage cannot. This overlooks the aforementioned inability to draw a distinc-
tion between action and language28 as well as the fact that actions can also be
interpreted in myriad ways and likewise inscribe meaning.
Second, despite reducing the playwright’s traditional role from one of
message giver to witness, it seems that at some level the idea of knowledge to
be communicated from playwright to audience still remains, in both intention
and the effects of theatre. For example, Ionesco suggests that ‘a work of art is
the expression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to communicate –
and which sometimes can be communicated. That is its paradox and its
truth’.29 Although minimised in these works, and particularly in the plays of
Beckett, this formulation retains the wish to communicate something from
playwright to audience, seen in the fact that Ionesco in particular never
abandons the desire to provoke change in his audience since ‘[t]o renew lan-
guage is to renew the conception, the vision of the world. Revolution consists
in bringing about a change in mental attitudes’.30 Although he refrains from
suggesting where this change might lead it still implies once more a residue of
the Old Master model of the passing of knowledge. Even when Beckett
sought to involve non-actors in the writing and staging of his plays, as long as
the role of the playwright is distinguishable it is difficult to see how, even if
only in a minimal way, it cannot help but retain the division of knowledge
that assumes an audience need for direction and leadership. Hence despite
Ionesco’s aims, as long as the absurd remains within the theatre setting,
institutional power structures will invest in this distinction to some extent, for
the playwright is still the one whose work, or simply raw idea, takes the
floor. The playwright is still in some sense the poet behind the work, the designer
of the project, and as such is the visionary whose creation takes precedence
over that of the audience.
There is a further issue here regarding who authors absurdity. This is
brought into focus in the relationship between the actor and playwright which
can also be seen to reproduce the logic of domination in the sense that how-
ever loosely the notion of playwright and play is retained there will always
remain some sense of an author behind the actions of an other. This does not
mean that such theatre could not still weaken and undermine sensible
Absurdity 157
configurations, but simply that it will do so at one remove from ‘politics’. The
potential of absurdity to provoke ‘politics’ depends on its being authored by
the subject itself.
These concerns are compounded by the fact that as long as absurdity is
institutionalised in the theatre or at least in a theatrical setting it is less able to
provoke change as its absurdity is to be expected and can be made sense of as
‘art’. By identifying the absurd as belonging within a theatre movement or
even within the arts more generally, we denote the arts as the proper place for
absurdity. This defuses the political potential of absurdity by taking away its
element of surprise, confusion and challenge to the sensible order.
Although a promising complementary art form for a more open democ-
racy, the Theatre of the Absurd is an institutionalisation of one particular
vision of the playfulness, questioning and possibility inherent in absurdity. As
such, institutionalised absurdity is at the behest of this particular vision rather
than operating without direction within the realm of everyday life. Conse-
quently, in the remainder of this chapter I want to consider if and how we
might think of the political power of the absurd in a way that is valuable for
‘politics’. If we might thus consider breaking with sense as a practice of
democracy, we need to ask how we may harness the power of the absurd in
the work of countering both actual and symbolic violence effected via the
sensible normative order.
In taking the absurd out of the theatre to liberate its emancipatory poten-
tial we are following in well-trodden footsteps. Many protest movements in
the 1960s, inspired by just such an aim, sought to bring together practices of
absurdity with politics in order to effect surprising new tactics of performance
protest in city streets. In particular, these groups sought to exploit the ‘limin-
ality’ of performance art whereby the removal of performance from the
theatre blurred the boundaries between performance and ordinary life,
increasing the effectiveness of the performances staged, and enabling the per-
formance to reach a wider audience beyond self-selecting theatre audiences.31
Some examples of these movements help to demonstrate how they combined
absurdity and ‘politics’.
In 1960s Latin America, Augusto Boal, inspired by Freirean pedagogical
practices and Brecht’s Marxist radical theatre developed the Theatre of the
Oppressed incorporating methods through which theatre could be used as a
weapon of revolution, to educate and change.32 The Theatre of the Oppressed
sought to overcome the spectator/actor divide by devising ways of audience
playwriting, and the exchange of roles. It also sought to dramatise ordinary
elements of life, including family relationships and the daily routine, often in
workshop form, in order to facilitate analysis and scrutiny by participants.
Even in its ‘finished’ form it encouraged performances outside of traditional
theatre settings. ‘Invisible theatre’ referred to planned but unannounced per-
formances in public spaces to facilitate audience participation and discussion
concerning a revolutionary topic. One performance involved a large number
of actors dining in a restaurant unbeknownst to the ordinary customers and
158 Absurdity
the restaurant staff. Upon finishing their meal one of the actors refused to
pay his bill and began to argue with the waiters about the cost of food. Other
actors, dining at other tables, joined in, arguing about income inequality and
the cost of living and encouraging and provoking non-actor customers to get
involved in the discussion. Importantly, the actors of invisible theatre never
revealed their identity. At the end of a performance, they sought simply to
disappear back into the streets from whence they came.

The distinction between performance and life was even more blurred by the
actions of the San Francisco Diggers, a break-away group from the more overtly
Marxist San Francisco Mime Collective. The director of the Mime Collective
declared the group’s intention not only to teach and direct with a view to
bringing about change but also to ‘be an example of change’.33 This third aim
became the prime motivation for the Diggers. They took their name from the
seventeenth-century English movement set up to oppose the enclosure of the
commons. Practising what they preached, this short-lived revolutionary group
set up a collective commonwealth, sharing their food and possessions.34
Inspired by this ‘vision of the total transformation of social and economic
relations’ peace and reliance on information pamphlets and direct action the
Diggers attempted to do the same in 1960s San Francisco.35 They were pri-
marily a political collective that sought to use avant-garde and absurdist per-
formance as one method of communicating their message, supplementing this
with a commitment to alternative living.
Motivated by the idea that ‘if one objected to capitalism, then one simply
abolished the system of private property’ the Diggers’ main project, the
enactment of ‘free’, aimed to set up a comprehensive model of an alternative
free society.36 Taking ‘free’ as an imperative as well as an adjective, it inspired
their actions, which included the distribution of free food and a free shop, and
over the next few years expanded their activities to include free housing, a
medical clinic, legal services and entertainment.
The Diggers’ use of performance itself sought to break down further the
divisions between performer and audience, but often within a broadly educa-
tional model. For example, they often utilised the symbol of the ‘frame’
through which they encouraged bystanders to pass (sometimes with the help
of a constructed wooden frame big enough to step through) to symbolise the
need to change one’s entire ‘frame of reference’ in order to abandon capitalist
ways. They integrated this with the Mime Collective’s use of carnival, utilising
masks, puppets and simple props to interact and work with bystanders. In one
example of the absurd at work, police trying to disperse the crowd that had
gathered at the 1966 ‘Full Moon Public Celebration’ even ended up in a terse
conversation with one of the Diggers’ puppets.37
A final and more recent example, as referenced in the opening epigraph, is
found in the Orange Alternative, inspired directly by the Dutch provos and
the New York-based Yippies, who were themselves inspired by the Diggers.
The Orange Alternative was a political and performance movement that used
absurdity to challenge the authorities in communist Poland. Their activities
Absurdity 159
centred on using absurdity to embarrass and confuse the authorities, and,
beyond ridiculous graffiti, included the organisation of gnome conventions,
Father Christmas rallies and the distribution of toilet rolls. Their events
sought loosely to orchestrate and integrate the innocent activities of passers-
by in order to provoke maximum perplexity for the state militia. The aim was
to avoid aggressive confrontation via events that were so silly any military
response would seem ludicrous. By simply calling for people to convene in

public spaces wearing red, or dressed as Santa Claus a week before Christmas,
they made it difficult to distinguish planned participants from passers-by and
usually resulted in the militia making arrests at random leading, for example,
to the mistaken arrest of several store workers who were simply dressed in
Santa Claus costumes for work. Such events made a mockery of the autho-
rities and their ability to keep order, despite the imposition of martial law.
Hence the Orange Alternative used absurdity to stage events that subtly
mixed protest and performance in such a way as to make a mockery of the
police authorities, making citizens less scared of the state and helping to
undermine the political order.
Practices of absurdity and in particular carnivalesque clowning and fantasy
have also been integrated into direct protest strategies. The philosophical and
theatrical absurdism of the 1960s soon began to influence student protests,
leading to scenes such as those when students handed teddy bears to riot
police in the confrontations of 1968.38 Such a break with ‘expected’ behaviour
of protest and demonstration is often used as a tactic to befuddle and confuse
police, who are not prepared to respond to passive, unpredictable and appar-
ently friendly behaviour. Indeed, David Graeber recounts how more recent
anti-globalisation protestors have taken to incorporating elements of street
theatre and absurdist action into their demonstrations in order to break with
logics and to avoid and diffuse aggressive confrontations with police. He notes
a ‘self-conscious’ desire among activists to ‘destroy existing paradigms’
through confusion and disorientation, citing groups of protestors simply sit-
ting down in front of a line of riot police, the protest group Ya Basta! who
attend protests dressed in absurd padded white overalls; the Pink Bloc, dres-
sed in tutus armed with feather dusters; Billionaires for Bush at the American
Party Conventions who handed out wads of fake money to police, thanking
them for suppressing their dissent; and the general mayhem created by
Revolutionary Anarchist Clowns, riding unicycles in rainbow wigs carrying
squeaky mallets. He suggests that such tactics are ‘perfectly in accord with
the general anarchist inspiration of the movement which is less about
seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimising and dismantling
mechanisms of rule while winning ever larger spaces of autonomy from it’.39
Hence we see absurdity being practised as a method of protest against the
state or supra-state organisations.
These examples demonstrate some ways in which the practice of absurdity
can be extracted from its institutionalised setting. However, they navigate
different routes through the concerns outlined above. Boal’s invisible theatre
160 Absurdity
maintains the notion of theatre as a tool to change people but seeks to over-
come the spectator/actor divide, as well as performing in the spaces of every-
day life; the Diggers blurred the distinction between performance and
everyday life even more through their mode of living ‘free’ but also sought to
create new meanings and order rather than simply break with meaning and
order. The Orange Alternative used absurdity not to direct political change
but merely to break with the current order, and also challenged the distinc-
tions between organisers, actors and audience, utilising everyday public
spaces. However, it still to some extent planned and orchestrated ‘events’.
Finally, protest movements use absurdity to confound and reveal contingency,
but also often seek to express a particular message or perspective and are seen
to be limited to particular events and public spaces. In many of these exam-
ples absurdity is used by protest movements or groups to break with police
logic in face-to-face confrontations between the people and the state. Yet Boal
and the Diggers also point beyond this confrontation into a more general
infiltration of absurdity in everyday life, confronting not just the state but our
wider everyday police order of the sensible.
In its use by performing arts and protest movements, absurdity is still in
some ways circumscribed, identified with a movement or group, mobilised for
a particular end, and often in public spaces at particular specified ‘events’
which are to some extent orchestrated. However, Rancière tells us that the
police order functions through organising our everyday sensory world, our
ways of being, saying and doing. It categorises these ways into identities and
then partitions the social according to these identifications. Hence the more
entrenched these identities – the more that our ways of being, doing and
saying accord with pre-ordained places and expectations – the stronger the
logic of domination and the greater the resistance to ‘politics’ and its ensuing
emancipation. Thus it would seem that absurdity has something to offer us
when practiced in the everyday rather than simply in the streets, or in public.
Absurdity of the everyday offers a way of breaking with our everyday expec-
ted and given identities in order to weaken identification, loosen attachments
and thereby undermine the hold of any police ordering.
Subversion as iteration in the work of Judith Butler

In order to theorise in more detail how absurdity could operate in this way to
resist and undermine identifications we need to understand more precisely
how our police order is constructed and maintained. Butler’s work can be of
help here because she theorises the way that social norms and identities are
maintained through performativity and repetition. Most famously she devel-
oped these arguments in relation to the performativity of gender.40 She argued
that there is no ‘true’ underlying gender that one’s behaviour as either male or
female expresses. Instead, we perform our gender, we learn to dress, talk, walk
and desire in accordance with the dominant idea of what it is to be male or
female, and this regulates our expectations and normative judgements of what
Absurdity 161
appearances and behaviours are masculine and feminine. We come to expect
men and women to look and act a certain way because the ongoing repetition
of this performance retroactively creates the illusion that there is an inner core
of gender ‘essence’. Hence for Butler gender is constructed.41
In examining Butler’s thematisation of performativity in more detail we can
identify a theory of subversion, whereby she not only theorises the way in
which any norms operate to govern social convention and behaviours but
also, at least initially, identifies ways in which these norms could be subverted
in order to create the possibility of alternate ways of living. This work can
supplement Rancière’s theory of ‘politics’ as subversion of the police, in par-
ticular by emphasising that in order for norms to be maintained they need to
be repeated. This repetition is identified by Butler as an Achilles heel to be
targeted via appropriation. However, in reading Butler and Rancière together
we also see that Rancière’s stronger emphasis on dis-identification and sub-
jectivation as a momentary break helps to draw out the way in which both of
these features are present, but downplayed, in Butler’s work. It thus seems
beneficial to combine Butler and Rancière’s work on subversion to theorise
how absurdity could work to loosen our sensory attachments and thereby
weaken entrenchment of the sensible order.
Butler’s theory of performativity forms a central part of her work on sub-
version. Although she does not describe herself as a theorist of subversion
and few of her commentators identify subversion as a key feature of her
work42 it is a recurring theme right from the subtitle of her most famous
work: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.43 This is not
to say that there is no literature on Butler and subversion. In the main, how-
ever, commentators have focused on either whether such subversion is
desirable, or possible,44 the interrelation between agency, parody and resigni-
fication45 or to critique or redevelop Butler’s approach on agency and sub-
version.46 In a critical vein Martha Nussbaum does engage with Butler on
subversion in order to explain that it is Butler’s focus on subversive practices
that make her work ineffective,47 whereas Penelope Deutscher emphasises
subversion as key to Butler’s work but merely in order to claim that Butler
fails to elucidate what it is.48 Although I too am not seeking to comment on
the role subversion plays in her overall project I am keen to reveal that where
Butler does discuss subversion she does so in a way that proves fruitful for
those of us interested in elaborating conditions which may be more conducive
to Rancièrian ‘politics’.49 In doing this I dispute Deutscher’s claim that Butler
does not tell us what subversion is, and instead suggest that we can identify a
theory of subversion in Butler’s work.
We can begin with Butler’s assertion that identities, in particular gender
identities, are performed rather than essential, and are maintained via repeti-
tion. This repetition is essential for the continuation of any identity, and
hence it provides us with a weak spot since it reveals that identities could be
subverted through inaccurate repetition. Butler theorises this by drawing on
Derridean theory of the interpretation of actions. Responding to Austin’s
162 Absurdity
work on the ways in which speech can perform certain acts (such as pro-
nouncing a couple as married or the making of a promise) Derrida suggests
that this performativity is only possible because of the accrued history of the
performative element which means that it repeats what has gone before and
thus builds up a precedent of historical force. Thus a performative can only be
recognised as such, and hence its significance understood, if it ‘echoes prior
actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or cita-
tion of a prior authoritative set of practices’.50 Thus a felicitous performative
(as Austin denotes a successful performative that achieves the desired end)
‘draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobi-
lized’.51 Given that there is no identifiable start point or primary source for
social behaviour and speech, Derrida uses the verb iterate rather than repeat
to denote each re-enactment of the performative. For example, Butler notes the
need for hegemonic heterosexuality to constantly reiterate itself in order to
seek to imitate its own idealisations which themselves change over time. Thus
hegemonic heterosexuality
must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and

normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on
originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is
beset by anxiety that it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become
its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is
consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be
excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself.52
However, this need for repetition imbues the maintenance of norms with vul-
nerability, since to subvert conventions all a performative needs to do is per-
form this iteration imperfectly. By inserting difference into each repetition it
draws on but at the same time reveals rather than covering over, the conven-
tions underlying it. Thus for Butler, subversion is a type of imitation with a
twist, an iteration in which something is not quite right, where the copy is not
exact. In its obvious and purposeful failure to imitate completely, parody and
mimicry can subvert by revealing the contingency of the original.
We therefore work the weakness of the heterosexual norm by revealing its
failure to apply in all cases and hence reveal that it is clearly not necessary or
natural as may have been thought. Furthermore, by revealing the way that these
norms are embodied via performativity Butler argues that there is no under-
lying ‘proper’ or ‘natural’ way to behave. Instead, our behaviours are per-
formed and thus constructed and hence could be otherwise. This then shows
the contingency of the assumed relationship between gender and sex. By asserting
the contingency of norms she seeks to argue that it is possible to construct
new ways of living and thereby overturn the normative order that oppresses,
excludes and subordinates those whose gender and sexual identity do not fit.
Famously, Butler demonstrates this subversion through the example of
drag. Consider the example she gives in Undoing Gender that in watching male
Absurdity 163
drag artists perform femininity ‘better than she thought she ever could’ she 53
realised how gender is something we perform rather than ‘are’. She thus argues that
drag can reveal to us the contingency of our heteronormative practices and thereby
opens up a possibility that such practices could, in future, be less violent as, after
realising their contingency (as opposed to their naturalness) they may no
longer be enforced upon people in either symbolic or actually violent ways.
Although drag will not always have this effect, at this point she notes that it may
at times be one way of effecting this realisation, and thereby subverting norms.
Butler thus emphasises far more explicitly than Rancière the importance of
repetition for the subversion of norms. In tandem with Rancière, Butler emphasises
that subversion functions via appropriation, not in the sense of appropriating
the dominant culture in order to sustain it and thereby remain subordinated
by it, but instead in a way that ‘seeks to make over the terms of domination, a
making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and
as performance, which repeats in order to remake – and sometimes succeeds’.54
She subsequently recognises the key role of appropriation for subversion
even more explicitly asserting that ‘the appropriation of such norms [those via
which the body is discursively produced] to oppose their historically sedi-
mented effect constitutes the insurrectionary moment of that history, the
moment that founds a future through a break with that past’.55
Hence both Rancière and Butler suggest that we can challenge the normative
order via practices of subversion that function via appropriation. Like Rancière,
Butler recognises that the success of such an attempt to context the normative
order can never be guaranteed, but argues that this should not prevent us
from recognising the immanent possibility that such activities present to us.
This leads Butler to conclude Gender Trouble by noting that greater atten-
tion needs to be paid to the conditions under which parody and drag as
parody will subvert, asking
What performance where will invert the inner/outer distinction and

compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of
gender identity and sexuality? What performance where will compel a
reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and the femi-
nine? And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the
performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized
categories of identity and desire?’56
Indeed, we see her calling for further work exploring what it is ‘that makes
certain types of parodic repetitions effectively repetitious, truly troubling, and
which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of
cultural hegemony’.57
However, concerned that her work in Gender Trouble implied a volitional
subject58 who could see these norms operating and choose when and where to
subvert them, Butler has diverted from this exploration of parody and instead
turned to clarify the way that subjects are not merely self-constituting but are
164 Absurdity
constituted by norms themselves and thus operate within a field of power
relations that limits their ability to see the constraints of norms and to act to
subvert them.59 This should help us to understand more clearly how subjects
can break with the norms that form them. She employs the ‘figure of turning’
to explain ‘how a subject is produced’60 and thus to subsequently identify
how a subject can turn against their constituting conditions. Although the
moment of the inauguration of the subject is theorised successively in the

work of Nietzsche, Althusser and Foucault, she finds that none of these thin-
kers explain how this turn is possible – the turn back on the self. However, she
suggests that this is due to a blind spot in these theories concerning the psy-
chic workings of power that overlooks the passionate attachments by which a
subject comes into being.61 Hence she proposes that any investigation into the
emergence of the subject needs to appreciate both the social and the psychic
workings of power. This does not simply mean that we can supplement Fou-
cault with Freud, however, for psychoanalysis assumes that there is some sort
of unconscious essence that is resistant to normalisation62 leaving us with an
impasse between determinism of productive theories of power and the agency
of psychoanalysis.63 Consequently, she sets about seeking to read theories of
power alongside psychoanalysis in order to trace an account of how power
forms subjection in ‘the turns of psychic life’ as well as an account of psychic
subjection in terms of the ‘regulatory and productive effects of power’:
If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation

of a subject, and if that formation takes place according to the require-
ments of power, specifically as the incorporation of norms, then a theory
of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorpora-
tion, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain
the psychic topography it assumes.64
Hence at this point, Butler’s investigation into subversion leads her to consider
more precisely the subject who may or may not subvert.
However, in tracing the psychic formation of the subject in relation to the
social, Butler is led further away from her focus on subversion and instead
begins to outline her subsequent ethical project. By the end of The Psychic
Life of Power she seems to have forgotten her opening concern with how the
subject can effect transformation and reduces agency to a focus on survival
instead.65 Indeed, in Giving an Account of Oneself she ends with a call to a
sort of ethical openness to being undone by the other,66 while her latest two
books are devoted to expounding the notions of liveability and responding to
precarity.67 Thus her turn to psychoanalysis does leave readers concerned that
the way in which the subject could effect political transformation was left
underdeveloped.68 Although she indicates that ‘the trauma of subjection
contains within it resources for reworking or resignifying the painful inter-
pellations constituting the subject, these resources are not identified or
explored in any detail’.69 Accordingly, both Disch and Lloyd suggest that
Absurdity 165
these resources can be found in Butler’s other text of the same year Excitable
Speech, in which she elaborates a practice of ‘talking back’.70 As in the
examples of poeticity in the above chapter, here Butler explores the potential
for insurrectionary counter-speech, which, like Foucault’s ‘reverse discourse’
appropriates the language and inscriptions of the dominant order to challenge
and rupture existing power structures and posit alternatives. However, I am
concerned that Butler has still not explained how exactly we come to break
with our social and psychic prohibitions to manipulate performativity and
resist or challenge our normative order. Furthermore, how can we loosen our
attachments to all identities in order to avoid these problematic structures in
the first place? In addition, she does not explain why she is willing to accept
the assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the priority psychoanalysis
gives to sexual attachments, or, translated into her Hegelian terminology, a
wider underlying desire for existence, which rather surprisingly, seems to
appear in her work as pre-discursive.71 Consequently, we are left to ask what
happens to subversion in Butler’s work and can we salvage her theory of
iteration for democratic ‘politics’ without having to commit to an untenable
notion of a volitional subject?
Reading Butler and Rancière together

In what remains of this chapter I contend that although subversion is by this
point perhaps rather subdued by Butler’s ethical turn it can be retrieved by
reading her work alongside Rancière’s ‘politics’. This prompts us to scrutinise
her critique of Foucault, in order to suggest that her turn to psychoanalysis
was unnecessary for we can instead use Rancière’s theory of subjectivation to
chart a route out of the aforementioned impasse between agency and deter-
minism. In contrast to Butler, Rancière suggests that subjectivation is the
moment that the subject, constituted in the sensible order, breaks with this
order, via a moment of politics that renders that order incomprehensible and
dysfunctional. This subjectivation is not a lasting condition but is instead
momentary, since the social will reorder and tuck this subjectivated subject
back in, giving it a place, and particular ways of being, doing and saying that
constitute its identity. Thus subjectivation is always a moment that leads back
into subjection. Rancière tells us that the police order is the order of dom-
ination. Hence Rancière’s ‘subjectivation’ gives us the break that Butler is
looking for, but where does this come from?
Since Rancière does not theorise subjectivation any further it is necessary
to turn back to the roots of the term in Foucault. As Milchman and Rosen-
berg note, although always interested in the emergence of the subject Fou-
cault introduced the term subjectivation to denote a shift in focus from the way
a subject is formed in relation to order and others, to the way that the subject
is formed in relation to the self.72 In contrast, in his earlier work he preferred
to use the term assujettissement to refer to the formation of the subject. In
light of this we can clarify the relationship between Rancière’s and Foucault’s
166 Absurdity
work, for Rancière’s police order regulates and organises our ways of being,
doing and saying and so appears to correspond to the Foucauldian domain
of assujettissement where the subject is conceived in relation to order and
others. In contrast, Rancière’s ‘politics’ involves the coming together of the
two, since as emphasised in Chapter 1, it relies upon the key trigger of sub-
jectivation, which Foucault tells us operates within the domain of the subject’s
relation to itself. This then enables appropriation and dis-identification from

the disciplinary forces of the social order and social relations.
Despite choosing to denote subjectivation in English in 1991 as sub-
jectification and in 2007 as subjectivization,73 when writing in French Ran-
cière always uses the term subjectivation indicating that this is his preferred
term. This allows us to locate his work within the Foucauldian framework
and as such indicates that in the same way that Foucault introduced the term
subjectivation to complement rather than replace assujettissement, Rancière’s
writing on subject formation as subjectivation via ‘politics’ is not to deny that
structures of power/knowledge restrict or subordinate us via the ‘police’74
structuring the very possibilities of resistance, but that subjectivation as the
trigger of ‘politics’ involves a relation of the self to being albeit within this
wider matrix. Hence we see that Rancière theorises the constructed self ’s
relation with itself in a way that is absent from Butler’s formulation.
In his introduction of 1984 to The Foucault Reader Paul Rabinow famously
suggests that we can identify a further distinction here in that the first two
modes of subject formation identified by Foucault (in relation to order and
others) condition the subject as passive in contrast to the third in which the
subject appears as active.75 Although this summary could be helpful analyti-
cally to show how Foucault’s focus changed over time, it can be misleading to
seek to categorise these modes as simply either passive or active since it
implies that the development of scientific disciplines and dividing practices
renders a fully passive subject while the process of subjectivation involves a
fully active subject. Milchman and Rosenberg suggest that the tendency
towards this interpretation has been encouraged due to the word that Fou-
cault originally used to refer to subject formation: assujettissement.76 They
note that although this ‘clearly entails subjugation and subjection’ it is also
meant by Foucault to include ‘autonomy, and the possibility of resistance, of
the one who is assujetti as well’.77 This active element within the formation of
disciplines and dividing practices is missed by the popular rendering of assu-
jettissement in English as ‘subjection or subjugation’ which confusingly seems
to render the subject as entirely passive or incapable.
Pertinently for our discussion, Milchman and Rosenberg note that Butler’s
reading of Foucault in The Psychic Life of Power does acknowledge both the
active and passive element of subject formation. However, they note that it is
a pity that Butler too decides to translate assujettissement as ‘subjection’
throughout The Psychic Life of Power78 since ‘subjection’ privileges an inter-
pretation of incapacity in the subject which runs counter to the more nuanced
subject she outlines. This allows readers to continue to misread passivity back
Absurdity 167
into her subject. Although her careful explanations work hard to preclude
such a reading it turns out that this is compounded by the way that, although
acknowledging Foucault’s shift to ethics and the introduction of his term
subjectivation Butler continues to read assujettissement as equivalent to sub-
jectivation.79 She thus interprets subjectivation as contiguous with her earlier
reading of assujettissement and thereby continues to overemphasise the way
that subjects are constituted overlooking the resources provided by Foucault’s

later work that denote the subject’s ability to constitute.
After The Psychic Life of Power Butler does go on to critique Foucault’s
later work and in doing so draws out further features of subversion. However,
these are increasingly overshadowed by her focus on ethics. In What Is Cri-
tique she identifies Foucauldian critique as a form of ‘desubjugation’, a
mechanism by which the subject ‘risks its deformation as a subject’.80 Hence
although the subject has to form itself ‘within forms that are more or less
already underway’ there is the possibility to disobey the principles accord-
ing to which one is formed, the aforementioned iterations of selfhood.
Interestingly, she notes that this becomes clear to her in Foucault’s introduction
of the term ‘subjectivation’ where we can isolate a possibility by which the self
‘delimits itself and decides on the material for its self-making’ even through
this delimitation takes place ‘through norms which are indisputably already in
place’.81 Hence Foucauldian critique offers one way in which the subject,
constrained by both the social and the psychic, can resist these constraints via
a practice of questioning. This necessarily involves self-transformation since
it helps to expose the limits of the normative order and it is at these limits
that such disobedience can be practised. In addition, both here and in Giving
an Account of Oneself Butler discusses Foucault’s later revisions of his
work on confession to emphasise how confessional practices need not
always be disciplinary, but are in themselves an act that can work in the
service of subjectivation if it prompts a relinquishing of the attachment to
the self, and the opportunity for reflection and remaking.82 In particular, she
suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis can, in this role, be rescued for
Foucault.
However, in the main, Butler does not emphasise these elements of her
work, subsequently turning away from politics and towards more ethical
considerations. This is first seen in the way she revises her initial claims about
drag, moving away from its use as an example of subversive behaviour to the
claim that it is simply identifiable as a critical site of ambiguity in Bodies that
Matter. She also suggests here and in The Psychic Life of Power that drag is
allegorical for performativity’s melancholic structure of loss that means all
identities are in part constituted by opposing identities they have rejected (e.g.
heterosexual by homosexual, male by female). By Undoing Gender she
surmises that her use of drag was not to claim
that drag was subversive of gender norms but that we live, more or less
implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts of ontology,
168 Absurdity
which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be considered
real and true, and which kind will not.83
Thus by this point she merely seeks to use drag to point out that ‘this set of
ontological presuppositions is at work’ and ‘that it is open to rearticulation’.84
In addition, drag makes ‘us question the means by which reality is made’85
thereby drawing our attention to the way that reality is constructed rather
than given.
Yet the questions of who does the constructing and how are here left
undeclared. Butler presents political transformation not so much as sub-
versive but more as explicit, foregrounded in her repeated use of the term
‘dispossession’ to refer to the aforementioned moment of desubjugation,
whereby it is only in losing oneself that the subject can find itself. Here the
loss of self emphasises the interaction with others: the loss of self, in others,
through dependency on others. Yet here she suggests that it is only in the
acknowledgement of such, its realisation, that we come to be dispossessed.
Such dispossession requires new social institutions, social critique and trans-
formation.86 Our ability to act for ourselves, rather than simply in accordance
with social and psychic norms, confusingly depends on the formation of new
social and psychic norms. In addition, despite her earlier emphasis on
appropriation Butler suggests that ‘resignification’ of meaning alone cannot
constitute a radical democratic politics since it is simply the way that meaning
is refigured over time and hence can be used by both the left and the right.
Instead, she suggests that it is politics in a radical democratic sense when co-
opted in service of ‘liveability’: attention to the conditions that render some
lives liveable and others unliveable.
Hence Butler’s focus here is less on the break with norms than on her own
particular project of resignification via an ethical project of attending to con-
ditions of liveability and intelligibility. Thus her investigation into the subjects
of subversion has led her to elaborate her own particular preferred way of
being. Furthermore, within this ethical turn she figures a new role for psy-
choanalysis as a practice of self-constituting through a non-disciplinary prac-
tice of confession. Butler does not acknowledge the extent to which this is not
only a critique of Foucault, but also entails a critique of psychoanalysis since
this transforms psychoanalysis from a discipline to a more Cavellian practice
of living in conversation with one another in order to constitute a mutual
working on ourselves. Although as noted in Chapter 3 such aversive practices
elaborated as an ethics may contribute to a better police order, in contrast
Rancière’s focus on the subject of subversion leads him to elaborate sub-
jectivation as the moment of break with all ways of being, doing and saying,
clearly situating Butler’s ethics within the domain of the police. Here we can
recall Rancière’s concern repeatedly outlined above that any turn to ethics
entrenches ways of being, often sharpening and deepening dividing lines
between the subject and the Other. Although this critique was directed
towards Derrida, the concern about ways of being applies to Foucault’s
Absurdity 169
‘modes of conduct’ too. However, it is interesting to note Foucault’s clar-
ification in one of his very last interviews in which he distinguished ethics as a
‘practice’ as opposed to an ethos which is ‘a manner of being’.87 By shifting
to identify ethics as a practice, Foucault indicates that it is volitional and is
less internalised by the self and more a tool for resistance. However, Butler’s
ethics is imbued in a set of values and norms that locate it as a way of being
rather than simply a set of practices. Thus Butler’s ethical turn poses pro-
blems for democrats, for she still has not elucidated how the subject can break
with dominant ways of being, nor how to ensure that her own preferred ways
of being do not come to dominate and exclude. I contend that Butler is pre-
vented from this reading of Foucauldian subjectivation as break, not just due
to her conflation of assujettissement with subjectivation but also due to her
alternate mapping of the sensory field alongside a confusion of the subject of
subversion with the subject of aversivity. As a consequence I will suggest that
we need to distinguish Butler’s ‘politics’ in the identification of subversion as
exploitation of the iteration of norms, from her turn to policing in the form of
a loosely psychoanalytic ethics.
With regard to the mapping of the sensory field then, the aforementioned
citation that drag makes us ‘question the means by which reality is made’
continues by asserting that it also makes us ‘consider the way in which
being called real or being called unreal can be no only a means of social
control but a form of dehumanizing violence’.88 Butler suggests that the
hegemonic order functions via a hierarchy of violence that denotes some as
humans while refusing to recognise others. She argues that the label ‘unreal’ ‘is
the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality’ and that one can be
oppressed by being called a copy, by being interpellated as not authentic, and
based on something else that is more real, more legitimate and thus of higher
value.89 Yet she goes on to say that it is even more serious than this, since
to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind,

you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as
possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is to be something else
again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that
one is unintelligible … is to find that one is has not yet achieved access to
the human.90
Here then we see her sketch the sensory domain as one of intelligibility versus
unintelligibility, real versus unreal, and later we see that it is this distinction
that structures whether or not one is compelled to live a liveable or an
unliveable life.91 However, if we return to Rancière’s sensory mapping as
outlined at the beginning of this chapter we can identify a clash. The unin-
telligible seems within the Rancièrian schema to denote that which cannot be
identified on a scale of either sense or nonsense. However, the illegitimacy
that unintelligibility renders in Butler’s terminology is intelligible. It is intelli-
gible as lesser, lacking, non-human, derisory or subordinated.92 Rancière
170 Absurdity
reminds us of this in his claim that there is no space beyond the police93
drawing our attention to the pervasiveness of policing to structure and reg-
ulate every inch of social space. This does not mean that such regulation
cannot be more or less severe, simply that it is always present. Consequently,
Butler’s choice of language at times seems to cover over the possibility of
subversion and resistance through unintelligibility here. Unintelligibility is
that which for a fleeting moment can force open the sensory order and create
the possibility for reconfiguration. The power of the unreal must not be
muddled with the very real domination that functions to regulate and main-
tain the distinction between the human and the nonhuman. By painting real
experiences of domination and oppression as unreal we risk – against Butler’s
very clear intentions94 – veiling and mystifying lives that have to be lived in
very real abject and dismal conditions. Furthermore, it displaces the potential
for the unreal and the unintelligible to function in the boundary between the
legitimate and the illegitimate, rather than on one side of this boundary. By
shifting them into the space between we free them up for use as tools of
subversion, the means for democratic subjectivation.
In addition, Butler does not distinguish the subject of subversion. In the
example of drag as subversive it seems that for Butler a subversive act is
one that reveals to its audience or spectators the contingency of the normative
order – it unveils for them the hidden workings of the norm. This recalls
Rancière’s aforementioned concerns about traditional critical theory as that
which seeks to reveal the hidden or masked depths of our system to those not
in the know. In contrast, Rancière is committed to the idea that the con-
tingency of the system is not some big secret but is actually already known.
What is needed is a moment of radical equality in which a subject, asserting
their equality appropriates that which is not theirs, dis-identifies with the role
they have been given and thereby demonstrate not a secret or a hidden
mechanism but that alternative orders are not only possible but have already
arrived.
Butler’s description of subversion and appropriation in Bodies that Matter
accords in part with Rancière’s theory here, but does not emphasise that the
subject of subversion is the one who appropriates, rather than the audience,
who are not passive, but who are watching and thinking about the appro-
priation that they have witnessed. In contrast, in her comments about Jennie
Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning the emphasis is shown to be on the audi-
ence rather than on the actor:95 the subversive effects seem to be on the
audience of the act – for example, those watching a drag performance.
Indeed, in her assessment of why drag pageantry in the film may fail to sub-
vert gender norms she suggests that its subversive potential depends on the
audience response, refusing to allow the film to become ‘an exotic fetish’ and
instead seeking the ambivalence that the film presents between ‘embodying –
and failing to embody – that which one sees’.96 Hence the potential for drag
to operate in such a way as to challenge the normative order is dependent on
other factors – the degree of fixity within which the audience, as subjects, are
Absurdity 171
held. However, in Butler’s discussion of appropriation the bodies that effect
the appropriation are the bodies of the performers: those who perform the
act. What is interesting about this blurring of the audience and subject of
subversion is that she thus conflates Cavellian aversive thinking with the sub-
version of ‘politics’. Her realisation of the performativity of gender while
watching a drag act was akin to the Cavellian aversive moment described in
Chapter 2. By separating aversivity from subversion in Butler’s work we can

distinguish her theory of subversion as appropriation via iteration from her
considerations of how to loosen our attachments to the normative order
through the ways we watch and interact with the arts and the social. This also
helps us to see more clearly the need to attend to the moment of subjectiva-
tion to help to cast light on who the subversive subject is and the self-oriented
practices that are required for Rancièrian ‘politics’. I would suggest that this
conflation of audience and performer is what led Butler to make her earlier
claim about drag as an identifiable critical site which she abandoned in her
later work. Instead, following Rancière’s logic, anything could be potentially
subversive; it simply depends on how it is played. Thus there is no need to
identify any such sites of ambivalence since appropriation means that any site
could be critical. It is always merely a matter of strategy.
In this chapter we have contrasted Butler’s theory of subversion figured as
an appropriation that ‘makes trouble’ with Rancière’s appropriation as dis-
identification and subjectivation to help us gain a better understanding of the
different stages of ‘politics’ and draw out the role of the subversive subject.
We have sketched how we can read Rancière’s ‘politics’ with Butler’s perfor-
mativity to help to identify practices whereby subversion can be triggered
though repetition. This has also enabled us to unpick the elision between
aversion and subversion in Butler’s work to help us focus more clearly on how
subversion functions without needing to follow her turn into the domain of
ethics. We are thus able to drawn on her theorisation of subversive acts as
repetitions that imitate ‘wrong’ which helps to elucidate what Rancière’s
appropriation consists of. This can supplement Rancière’s thematisation of
subversion as appropriation and dis-identification to help us theorise sub-
versive acts as repetitious appropriation that provoke dis-identification and
hence subjectivation.
However, in appreciating Butler’s greater emphasis on the subject as con-
stituted as well as constituting, we must emphasise that subjectivation is not
volitional. Given that we can never guarantee that subjectivation will occur, if
we are to create conditions under which it may be more likely there is a need
to identify a democratic practice in the practice of absurdity. Absurdity is
clearly important for the moment of ‘politics’ itself, given that this is a
moment when the logic that orders sense is ruptured by an enactment that
cannot be situated or made sense of. Thus all ‘politics’ has to operate within
the domain of the absurd. However, since this cannot be planned or guaran-
teed owing to our inability to see logics at work, we need a practice that
loosens our attachments to our order to start with, thereby working away
172 Absurdity
constantly to undermine the entrenchment of any order of the sensible. This is
where absurdity can operate as a democratic dissensual practice. Through
repeating the everyday but repeating with a twist, absurdity is that which
operates at the edges of sensible order; it is constituted by the very vulner-
ability of our sensory perceptions. As such, an open-ended practice of
absurdity can operate to weaken attachments, as well as at times contributing
to the irruption of ‘politics’.
Police logic is the logic of domination. Hence any practice that loosens our
attachments to police logic works to create conditions that are more con-
ducive to ‘politics’ – the moment of emancipation and equality. Such a prac-
tice cannot prescribe exact behaviours or strategies, instead it works at a more
abstract level, simply encouraging inexplicable behaviour, clowning and play
that questions and turns on its head our everyday practices to examine them
anew, to play with language and inscription in order to question why things
are currently inscribed the way they are, and an appreciation of the impos-
sible as figured in dreams to inspire and push at the boundaries of our current
world. By refusing to take the police order seriously, by throwing in the
occasional banana97 and engaging with humour and play we find yet more
resources that help to prevent the order of domination from gaining too
strong a hold over our lives. Such a practice figures anyone who enacts it as
an actor in the sense of one who directs their own actions, but not necessarily
in the direction of any particular outcome, simply to work on ourselves, to
weaken our own attachments to our current sensory order, and to help us to
identify sites and strategies for ‘politics’.
Practicing absurdity, living the carnival

When Judith Butler visited the Wall Street occupation she noted the power of
bodies in the street ‘in alliance’. Taken in isolation this statement could seem
frustrating and apolitical, since bodies in alliance in the street could mean all sorts
of things, and not necessarily democracy or the power of the people. However,
in this chapter we have seen Butler’s commitment to the potential of bodies to
come together in a certain way, to build something new, to subvert existing
norms and to challenge current ways of living. Butler’s ‘bodies in alliance’
have the potential to be subjects of subversion, through repetitious appropriation,
dis-identification and subjectivation. This argument brings us full circle. Although
we noted in Chapter 1 that Žižek’s response to Occupy Wall Street asserted
that the carnival will soon be over and we will then have to return to our ordin-
ary lives,98 the tradition of the absurd prompts us to question this assessment.
First, the carnival is much more than mere ‘fun’. The Orange Alternative’s
absurdity had a deadly serious side as reflected in arrests and interrogations.
Since the carnival has the potential to weaken the logic of domination, then
contra Žižek, we need to find a way of taking the serious business of carnival
into our ordinary lives.99 Absurdity calls us to keep the carnival alive, to carry
it beyond any instantiation of protest, into the everyday.
Absurdity 173
By reading Rancière and Butler together on the topics of subversion, sub-
jectivation and meaning, this chapter has sought to emphasise the role of
subjectivation in subversion, and to theorise subversion as subjectivation that
arises from repetitious appropriation which triggers dis-identification with the
dominant order. In contrasting the aesthetics of subversion for both Rancière
and Butler we come to appreciate the potential of the tradition of the absurd,
abstracted from its usual location in the arts and refigured as a democratic
practice, to undermine the strength of the sensible order. Given the aim of
this book to defend Rancière’s ‘politics’ against claims that it is impossible to
plan, is unavailable and ineffective, and instead to argue that it is of supreme
value for those of us who seek to challenge the increasing poverty, insecurity
and terror prevalent in our contemporary era it may seem incongruous to
conclude with a discussion of the value of the absurd. Yet this chapter has
claimed that far from being frivolous the absurd offers the opportunity to
undermine the very forces of conformity that entrench such poverty, insecur-
ity and terror and enable us to circumvent the logic of domination by refusing
to meet it on its own ground. If we too render the absurd as frivolous we
merely replicate police logic and close down the serious potential of absurdity
to help us to bring about alternative, more egalitarian, worlds.
Notes
1 Fleming (2013: n.p.).
2 Rancière (2011b: 181, italics in the original).
3 Rancière (2010a: 38).
4 Discussed in The 10 Theses (Rancière 2001, repr. as 2010a).
5 Rancière (2001: n.p., italics added).
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Rancière repeatedly uses the term ‘paradox’ to describe politics and the way that
politics initiates democracy. See, for example, 1999: ix, 15, 17, 55, 61, 62, 65, 72,
83, 98, 101.
10 Although Schaap (2009) has identified an element of the absurd within Rancièrian
‘politics’, he uses this in a conversational sense rather than drawing on the philo-
sophical tradition.
11 Butler (2004: 39, 226).
12 Camus (1942: 18).
13 Ionesco (1957).
14 Esslin (1960, 1968); Fotiade (2001); Cornwell (2006); Cartledge (2013).
15 Schufrieder (1983: 68).
16 Kierkegaard (1941).
17 See in particular The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
18 Esslin (1968: 392).
19 Ibid.: 393.
20 Ibid.: 24.
21 Ibid.
22 See ibid.: 318, as well as Esslin (1960).
174 Absurdity
23 Esslin (1968: 331). Esslin notes that the tradition in verbal nonsense has a history
as long as that of verbal expression itself for so long as there are rules of commu-
nication there are opportunities to break the rules. He traces the tradition of verbal
nonsense from thirteenth-century poetry, through Shakespeare’s poems to the Vic-
torian poetry of Lear and Carrol, and the nonsense prose of Flaubert and Joyce.
24 Ibid.: 26. See, for example, Ionesco’s farce The Chairs.
25 Ibid.: 400.
26 Ibid.: 406, italics in the original.
27 Ionesco (1958), cited in Esslin (1968: 406).

28 See Chapter 4.
29 Ionesco (1958: n.p.).
30 Ionesco (1959). Translation taken from Esslin (1968: 406).
31 Cohen-Cruz (1998).
32 Boal (1979: 122 in particular).
33 Doyle (2002: n.p.).
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Allen (2007a: 81).
39 Graeber (2002: 68).
40 1990.
41 To use the term ‘constructed’ is not to imply that this construction is volitional. It
does not happen at will but occurs through the dynamic interaction of the subject
in the social.
42 Except for Chambers and Carver (2008).
43 In this work as well as in later texts she seems to employ the term ‘making trouble’
as a sort of shorthand for ‘subversion’.
44 Stone (2005: 5).
45 Lloyd (1999, 2005a, 2005b).
46 Disch (1999); Webster (2000); McNay (2000).
47 Nussbaum (1999).
48 Deutscher (1997).
49 Similarities in their work can immediately be seen by comparing their discussion of
Rosa Parks’ protest, in which both identify a subversion through appropriation
(Rancière 2006a: 61; Butler 1997b: 147).
50 Butler ( 2011b: 172, italics in original; inspired by Derrida (1988).
51 Butler ( 2011b: 172, italics in original).
52 Ibid.: 85.
53 Butler (2004: 213).
54 Butler (1993: 95).
55 Butler (1997b: 159).
56 Butler (2006b: 189, italics in the original).
57 Ibid.
58 Butler, Preface to 2006b edn.
59 See principally Butler (1993 and 2007a).
60 Butler (1997a: 3).
61 Ibid.: 7.
62 Ibid.: 88.
63 See Disch (1999) on this.
64 Butler (1997a: 18–19).
65 Disch (1999: 554).
66 Butler (2005: 136).
67 Butler (2006a, 2009).
Absurdity 175
68 Disch (1999: 554, citing Butler 1997a: 18).
69 Lloyd (2007: 101).
70 Disch (1999) and Lloyd (2007).
71 Chambers (2003: 147). See also Rancière’s (2009e) critique of Freud.
72 Milchman and Rosenberg (2007).
73 Two of the few essays Rancière wrote in English rather than in French.
74 Despite many claims – see Chapter 1 – that Rancière has not paid enough atten-
tion to this topic.
75 Rabinow (1984: 11).

76 Milchman and Rosenberg (2007: 55).
77 Ibid., italics in the original).
78 Ibid.: 76.
79 Butler (1997a: 11, see also 2005: 17).
80 Butler (2002).
81 Ibid.
82 Butler (2004: Ch. 8, and 2005: Ch. 3).
83 Butler (2004: 214).
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.: 217.
86 Ibid.: 7.
87 Foucault (1984b: 377).
88 Butler (2004: 217).
89 Ibid.: 218.
90 Ibid.
91 Further elaborated in Butler (2005) and (2006a).
92 See her discussion of this in Butler (2004: 30 and Ch. 10, particularly pp. 217–218).
93 Butler (2011a: 4).
94 See her critique of Agamben on this point (Butler 2006a: 68).
95 In making this observation I am not simply trying to find an alternative way to
distinguish between the drag performer as an active subject and the audience as
passive, for as Rancière emphasises, the audience is always ‘active’. However, what
is interesting is consideration of the modes by which members of the audience may
or may not experience subjectivation differently from the ‘actor’ in the way that
they act as they spectate.
96 Butler (2011b: 95).
97 Allen (2007b) and example in (1998).
98 Butler (2011b: 68).
99 On the seriousness and political nature of carnival see Tancons (2014).
Reflections on revolutionising
A voyage without a compass
The sea smells of sailors, it smells of democracy. The task of philosophy is to

found a different politics, a politics of conversion which turns its back on the
sea … In response to these assaults we know, however, that the sea will take its
revenge.
This book has proposed that Rancière’s work is of use for those of us seeking
to combat poverty, insecurity and inequality. By recasting politics as a
moment of equality and democracy as a practice rather than a system of
government, we are forced to consider the leftist project as dual layered,
committed to strategies that can bring about redistribution of wealth and
resources while simultaneously fighting against domination. This requires
struggle on the terrain of the state as well as beyond it, not in terms of ‘taking
power’ but in redefining and transforming rights and institutions wherever
this will support emancipation. This need not provoke a ‘fear of being incor-
porated into state structures’ so as much as to remind us that state structures
too are ‘an effective field of battle’.2 Redistribution is necessarily part of any
egalitarian movement but redistribution is not as impossible as many on the
left as well as on the right make out, and alone it is not enough. For eman-
cipation to accompany redistribution the logics of domination must be
undermined as well. In Rancière’s terminology this calls for in-depth theori-
sation of the relationship between politics and police: how might the police
order be challenged and undermined so as to support opportunities for
emancipation?
In response to this question Chapter 1 emphasised the role of strategy in
making politics happen. It identified the three constituent elements of ‘poli-
tics’ as appropriation, dis-identification and subjectivation and argued that
while ‘politics’ cannot be planned the focus on the strategic use of these three
elements can make it more effective and more available. However, in the absence
of an elaboration of this relationship between ‘politics’ and the police order in
Rancière’s work I then suggested that it is helpful to read him alongside four
other thinkers, Christoph Menke, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida and Judith
Butler, in order to identify dissensual practices which could contribute to
Postscript 177
making ‘politics’ more likely. These practices undermine and weaken any police
ordering. They operate on the edges of the sensible to untangle, question and
loosen our given ways. Reflexivity untangles and weaves afresh the threads tying
us to the past and everything we thought we knew. Aversivity loosens our
attachments to our identities, our ways of being. Poeticity undermines our
ways of saying, our ways of relating and organising through linguistic mean-
ing. Finally, absurdity playfully queries our ways of doing whatever it was
that we were supposed to be doing. These are all practices that work on the
police. They are volitional practices that we can take up at will, not to guar-
antee any particular planned future but to make alternative more egalitarian
futures more likely as well as to undermine existing domination today.
Emancipation does not rely on such practices. It is always possible. However,
its costs vary. These practices help to reduce the costs by operating in both
the short and the long term. They are tools of resistance against any ordering,
any instance of domination. They fight consensus and set democracy against
our so-called democracy to produce more democracy. This is a democracy
that opposes all instances of poverty, insecurity and inequality and never
ceases to work in service of the promise of emancipation. Rancière suggests
that the ‘politics’ of this democracy is optimistic: it makes possible the
impossible. I have added that in our current world such ‘politics’ is urgent.
As this book of dis-orientation comes to a close, let us pause to consider
the silty ground of the word-island where we have washed up. We hereby
bring into focus the metaphor of the voyage that has accompanied us
throughout this narrative and which is woven into many of Rancière’s texts
where it serves as a perpetual reminder of Plato’s initial act of enclosure
that claimed philosophy as a tool of the powerful.3 With the final back-
ward glance of this book we find ourselves pausing to reflect on Rancière’s
critique of modernity via the famous tale that sent Plato’s philosophy back
to sea in the modern age: the death of God that Nietzsche recounts in The
Gay Science. This is not simply a fable about the waning influence of religion.
It is the story of the death of metaphysics, the death of certainty and truth
with regard to the ways in which we understand the world. It is a story of
land and sea, of knowledge and ignorance. Nietzsche’s madman announces a
new age that seems at first to be free of the need for certainty:
at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free
spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with grati-
tude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems
clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out
to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed
again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such
an ‘open sea’.4
In this new age philosophy can once again go to sea without the constraints
of all that once held us in its sway. Philosophers sail courageously,
178 Postscript
directionless and free. There is no sign of land on the horizon, yet this does
not frighten them. They sail in heady bliss at no longer needing to feel the
solid ground beneath their feet. In the wake of God’s death Nietzsche can
introduce us to that which has for too long been masked by the image of
God: mankind is driven by a will to power. Philosophy can now seek new
meanings and pit them against each other in an unending quest for domina-
tion through control of knowledge. We use knowledge to dominate others and

without one universally accepted truth we can acknowledge that all we have is
struggle. Rousseau told us that mankind is everywhere in chains. Reading
Rousseau after Nietzsche Foucault adds that if we are to understand or
maybe even overcome these chains it is power that we must study rather than
metaphysics. So what can we add now in the wake of our journey?
Nietzsche tells us that despite God’s death there are caves in which his
shadow is still shown. The enduring presence of this shade becomes a state-
ment on how we conceive the material world. It represents all our tricksy
ways of mediating the material through meaning. Without them we would not
know the world at all. So it is puzzling that Nietzsche then tells us that we
must ‘defeat’ God’s shadow as well.5 He notes that our happy philosophers
are too wrapped up in the ‘immediate consequences’ of the death of God and
do not look far enough ahead to see the dark clouds that it will bring – the
clouds of the eternal struggle of the unbridled will to power. He asserts that
we must overcome our will to interpret, to understand, to order and categor-
ise, to know. Socrates’ oracle announced ‘Know thyself ’. Nietzsche says not
only that we never can but that we should stop trying and embrace not
knowing. But will we ever be free of this shadow, the entanglement of our
existence with knowledge? Can we ever vanquish our desire for certainty, to
entrench one interpretation as the one truth over all others? Nietzsche says we
cannot although we can appreciate that this is merely an attempt to ground
knowledge in a quest for domination and therefore not truth itself.
So what might this mean for thinking and acting today? Nietzsche
despondently warns us that we may remain in thrall to God’s shadow on the
walls of caves for a long while yet, invoking Plato’s tale of cave dwellers cap-
tivated by the shadows of puppets on the wall. We recall that it was only the
clever few, the philosopher kings, who saw the trickery at work and, turning
their backs on the realm of shadows, stumbled up the pathway out of the cave
to contemplate true knowledge in the bright light of the sun. In Nietzsche’s
version, those ‘in the know’ realise that there is no true knowledge. They embark
on a lifetime’s voyage without a map, without directions, on an adventure of
open-ended exploration to seek new meaning which they can teach the
ignorant townsfolk. Nietzsche’s tale helps us to distinguish between those who
know and those who do not; between those who live a worthy life, bravely
searching for knowledge; and the foolish who stay on land, in caves, seeking
meaning in candle smoke and shadows.
Yet in this passage Nietzsche prophesies in the terms of the world he
derides and places too much faith in the philosopher sailors. It is not
Postscript 179
philosophy that must go back to the sea, but knowledge, slipping loose of the
boundaries that philosophy always seeks to impose. Now that Nietzsche has
unmasked the will to power those in charge of knowledge are seen to have the
supremely powerful role. They control the tools for domination. Domination
is an all or nothing game. Domination has no place for ambiguity. Defeating
God’s shadow consequently has three possible interpretations. First, it could
indicate that we dispel the shadow or the spectre of God. We no longer crave
understanding and meaning and can come to know the walls of the cave as they
really are, unmediated by shadows or spectres. Second, Nietzsche derides the
idea that we can know truth or certainty so we must consider if perhaps there
is no knowledge to be had of those walls of stone. We must grow indifferent
and thus it would not matter if God’s shadow persisted or not. However,
without his shadow how would we access the walls and if we are to be indif-
ferent why must we defeat these shadows at all? Third, then, if these shadows
are to be defeated it must be so that we can put something else in their place,
some other shadow to capture our imaginations. And with the priests
defeated, the philosophers become the master puppeteers.
Alternatively, to escape or at least undermine the puppet masters’ show we
could ask why we must defeat the shadows at all? If we are to embrace not
knowing we do not need to use the language of domination and annihilation.
The shadows do not need to be defeated. Our indifference simply leads us to
finding them less enchanting. Ambiguity and uncertainty means we cannot
proclaim the death of certainty with certainty. If certainty is dead we live
instead in a perpetual state of ambiguity whereby we cannot know and yet we
cannot help but seek to know. It would seem that there is no pathway out of
the cave and no way of overcoming our search for the path. What if we have
always been at sea while all along pretending to be on land? Nietzche
announces uncertainty and yet we still seek knowledge. If all we know is that
we cannot know and yet we still want to know, what we need is to work out
how to proceed through the uncharted waters of the shadow lands between
our desire to know and our realisation that we never can. The waters through
which we navigate our lives, where the chains that bind us are smashed open
yet in the same moment reforged differently, where some claim to be philosophers
and others propose that they are only in thrall to new shadows.
What then of Nietzsche’s philosopher sailors? With certainty still in the
picture, though now strangely marked by ambiguity, we lose our ability to
distinguish between those in the know and those who still await the message
of the madman. We are all at sea and all at sea and the spirit of adventure
that marks Nietzsche’s philosophers becomes the continuous struggle for
equality that marks the democratic movement. The madman rushes back to
the square not realising that his time has not yet come but that he was too
late (although he cannot dispel a nagging doubt that he is not needed at all,
for the townsfolk knew his secret all along, hence their embarrassed silence).
He has had another dream: a dream marked not by clarity but by ambiguity;
a dream of mankind, philosopher indistinguishable from non-philosopher,
180 Postscript
free spirit from unfree spirit (and the sea thus owned by no one and fair game
for all) sailing forever the narrow straits between the land of stones and flesh
and the God-shaped shadows on the misty horizon. Between certainty and
uncertainty mankind will always construct shadows to pit against each other.
Nietzsche knew that the will to power means struggle. Plato knew that the
shadow lands are the realm of ‘politics’. Yet both seek to escape struggle and
politics via knowledge, knowing full well that any attempt to escape is merely
an attempt to mask power. It can never be transcended. Philosophy cannot
kill certainty for we are crafty and will use shadows for our own means. In a
mischievous twist of fate, leaving the philosophers fighting with ghosts and
shadows in the cave below and despite not knowing or perhaps not caring if
the mind plays tricks the people of the cave sneak up on deck and raise the
anchor, and straining to make out the shadows in the mist, head for them,
hearing the call of sea birds and human voices in the sound of the wind. In
the moment that Nietzsche tells us to defeat God’s shadow he seems to forget
that despite the promise of freedom, the illusion of sailing into the ‘open’,
long before Plato unknowingly founded the Western canon, and without the
help of ‘philosophy’, people learnt to navigate by the stars.
The practices elaborated in the preceding chapters are proposed as techni-
ques we can use to traverse the ambiguity of our existence in the shadow
lands. Rancière’s writings reflect on what it means to question meaning while
relying on meaning; to continue to struggle for freedom despite the perpetual
negotiation of oppression. This can prove fruitful in providing us with tools to
navigate the world of order; to loosen the hold of sense and thereby weaken
domination. The focus on politics indicates that the will to power can be
challenged through subjectivation but that this is an ongoing struggle, a
journey that does not know where it will end up, that does not aim to end up
anywhere. It is a journey that as democrats committed to universal equality
we have already embarked upon, but necessarily without an overriding sense
of direction, for we have disoriented the knowledge we thought we had.
Yet to fight for better worlds today requires embracing our immersion in
the current order of meaning, to exploit its weakness and change it for the
better. In doing this we will over and again continue to fall in love with sha-
dows and become ensnared anew in preferred directions and end points.
Rancière’s work gives us tools to smash each compass that we forge and turns
our minds to wondering what lies beyond the charts we draw. It helps us both
to act in the here and now and simultaneously to navigate the ambiguity
between our love of shadows and the nagging doubts that the shadows can
never fulfil. Democrats ‘do’ democracy not so much as a regime but as a
practice. Democrats revolutionise with a cause but a cause that can never be
established once and for all – an axiomatic cause of equality. And because
they have a cause, but no place in which they can come to shore and set up
camp, they must continue the unending struggle against domination. Perpe-
tual revolutionising names this movement without an end point, a journey
without ultimate direction. Although we may not be able to overcome the
Postscript 181
habit of searching out the stars in the sky, we can also sail under the clouds
that Nietzsche foresaw, for emancipation has no need of compasses; it dwells
in the here and now.
Rancière tells us that he seeks to map the possible, yet in so doing we have
seen that he also charts the ever present markings of the impossible drawn on
the same map. What is possible is constructed via our understandings of the
world and by being, saying and doing what has heretofore been considered
impossible we can change these understandings. By enacting the production
of different social relations we demonstrate that other ways of being, saying
and doing are thinkable, sayable and doable. But in the same way that we
cannot read back into history the definitive reasons why we are where we are
now, we also cannot know where we will get to in the future. We can only do
politics a day at a time, with no grand plan to direct us to where we want to
end up. That does not mean that we will not make plans, just that we need to
be wary of them controlling us, and always remain open to revising them. All
democrats can ever do is continue the battle. Although we will always try to
navigate our struggle we would do well to avoid the allure of compasses and
charts, but instead set sail in the misty morning half-light to see where the
wind and the waves may take us; to see, to just see, what other worlds might
be possible if we set out from the assumption that all might be equal. Whe-
ther or not we have amazement or foreboding in our hearts we may find a
smashed compass in our pockets. It would remind us that we are not there
because we are philosophers but because each of us may be no more a phi-
losopher than anybody else.
Notes
1 (2007b: 2–3, 2nd edn).
2 Rancière et al. (2008: 183).
3 Rancière (2007b: 1).
4 Nietzsche (2001: 343, italics in the original).
5 Ibid.: 108.
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Index
2008 financial crisis 3–4 Butler, Judith 7; Bodies that Matter 168,
9/11 3, 4, 10 17; drag 164, 168–72; ethics 165–70;
Excitable Speech 166; gender 161–5,
absurd/absurdity: tradition of the absurd 168–9, 171–2; Gender Trouble, 162,
152–61; absurdity as practice 152–61, 164, 165; Giving an Account of Oneself
172–3 165, 168; insurrectionary speech 166;
Adorno, Theodore 80–1 normativity 153–4, 158, 161–72;
aesthetic practice: emancipation and 62; parody 162–5; performativity
experience and 77; knowledge as 77; 161–6, 168, 172; Psychic Life of
of philosophy 61, 79; politics as 76 Power, The 165–169; repetition
aesthetics of knowledge 72, 77 161–3; speech acts 163, 166;
aesthetic regime 120, 140, 141 subversion 161–6, 168–74; Undoing
‘A Few Remarks on the Method of Gender 164, 174; ‘What is Critique?’
Jacques Ranciere’ (Rancière) 45 168
Althusser, Louis 67, 68, 165
America see philosophy Cameron, David 7
appropriation 31–2, 51–3; performativity carnival 6, 159–60, 173–4
and 162, 164, 167, 169, 171–4; writing Cavell, Stanley: aversive thinking 96–112,
and 122, 123 114n69; double self 90–1, 95–6, 106;
archipolitics 62–3; moral perfectionism ethics 91, 95, 102–3, 109; exemplars
and 91, 98, 100 91, 100, 101, 103, 105–12; film
aristocracy 24 (remarriage comedies) 107–10;
Aristotle 16–21, 63, 140 marriage 103–5; moral perfectionism
assujettissementsee Foucault, Michel 91, 98, 100–2, 107, 109; Pursuits of
Athenian democracy 18, 71 Happiness 108
Austin, John 163 Chambers, Samuel: on Rancière and
aversive thinking see Cavell, Stanley politics 40–1, 45–6; literarity 124–5,
aversivity 98, 103, 114n41 139
civil rights 37,43, 51, 54
Ballanche, Pierre Simon, 33 Clinton, Bill 11
Balzac, Honoré de 139 communism 3–9, 36, 38–9, 49; see also
Bauman, Z. 86n7, 87n18, democracy
Blair, Tony 11 conformity 12, 48, 125, 152–3; Rancière
Blanqui, Louis Auguste 31, 35, 118, 144 on 92–95; aversive thinking and
British National Party (BNP) 25n8 96–100, emancipation and 111
Boal, Augusto 158–9, 161 Connolly, William 103
Bourdieu, Pierre 83, 86n7 consensus democracy 9–10
Brown, Wendy 27n65 crisis 3–9, 65 see also democracy
196 Index
critical theory Rancière’s critique of Emancipated Spectator, The (Rancière)
61–69 see also domination, and 95, 109
Menke, Christoph emancipation 1–3, 23–4, 56n33; via aver-
critique 61, 67, 68–69, 77, 78, 79, 168 sive thinking 97–9; against conformity
93–5; critical theory and 61–2 69–72;
Davis, Oliver: literarity 121, 124–56; 132, domination and 7–9; and exemplarity
141 107, 110–111; for Foucault 75; and the
Dean, Jodi on communism 5–6; commu- left 11–13, 58n79; and politics 95, 97,
nist party 54, 58n95; critique of Ran- 111; via revolution 80–2, 85; social/
ciere 8–11, 34–6 38, 43, 46; Occupy aesthetic 66; strategy for 48–50; and
Movement 49, 118, 145 subjectivation 44, 46–7, 92–5, 97, 100;
deconstruction, see Derrida, Jacques and writing 140; see also aesthetic
democracy-to-come, see Derrida, Jacques practice
democracy: communism and 8–9; crisis Emerson, Ralph Waldo 95–111
and 3–4; emergence of 1, 27n75; Enlightenment 57n45, 62, 65, 71–2, 78,
equality and 2, 39; freedom of the 88n62 see also Menke, Christoph
people 18, 100; institutional/ised 1, 2, episteme see Foucault, M.
39, 46, 56n35, 133; literarity 131, 132, equality: and politics 1–3, 17–22, 29–30,
133–140; subjectivation and 25n2; 37, 39, 44, 88n62, 89n104, n106; revo-
writing and 134–41; seealso Derrida, lution and 83–5; literature and 133–6
Jacques; postdemocracy; consensus see also democracy
democracy; representative democracy ethics/ethos: 14, 97, 102–3, 109, 144 see
Derrida, Jacques: deconstruction 130; also Butler, Judith; Cavell, Stanley;
democracy-to-come 75–7; democracy Derrida, Jacques; and Foucault,
137; democratic paradox 75; ethics Michel
75–7; Force of Law 76; literature 137; exemplars see Cavell, Stanley
logocentrism 129; messianism 77;
other 76–7; phonocentrism 120; Flaubert, Gustave 136,
Plato’s Pharmacy 130; politics 76, 137, Flesh of Words, The (Rancière) 122, 126,
129; promise 75; Rogues 76; writing 131, 134, 135
129 Foucault, Michel: assujettissement 167,
Descartes, René 71 domination 73–75; ethics, ethos and
Dis-agreement (Rancière) 32, 39, 40, 42, critique 74–5, 78, 170; episteme
45, 62, 94, 118, 126, 143, 153, 146n25; policing 22; power 36; sub-
dis-identification 14–15, 32, 33, 39–40, jectivation 167;
53–54, Frankfurt School, The 62, 80
disciplinarity: access to knowledge 130, freedom of the people see democracy
167; bodies 22; critical thinking 14, 80, Freire, Paolo 158
82; differences between Foucault and French Revolution 8, 70–3, 83, 134
Ranciere 74; Derrida and 131; ethics Freud, Sigmund 165–6
62, 86; party 6, 49, 54; perceptions
152; psychoanalysis 169 Gauny, Louis-Gabriel 31
Dissensus: on politics and aesthetics gender see Butler, Judith
(Rancière) 20, government: democracy as system of 1–3,
dissensus: literary 136–7; political 62–3, 133–5
79, 117, 137, 145, 156; of sense 152–3 Gramsci, Antonio 112n5
domination: politics and 1, 3, 22–4, 43,
49, 88n78; conditions of 7; logic of 8, Habermas, Juergen 143–4
157, 161; the left and 11, 13, 56n32, Hardt, Michael 5
58n95, 67, 69–79, 80–85 see also Fou- Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 70, 71,
cault, Michel 81, 166
double self, the see Cavell, Stanley history as discipline 77, 79, 127, 130–2,
Douzinas, Costas 4 142
drag see Butler, Judith Honig, Bonnie 103
Index 197
Horkheimer, Max 80–1 Mute Speech (Rancière) 122, 126, 131
Hugo, Victor 141 myth 142; of nobility 18–19; of Theuth
121–2, 128, 129, 130, 132; of cicadas
identification 19, 31–2, 37, 39–40, 48, 127, 129, 130, 132; of the island 137
161, 170,
identity 37, 40, 53, 66, 77, 97, 106, 118, Names of History: On the Poetics of
163–4, 166 Knowledge, The (Rancière) 126, 130
Ignorant Schoolmaster, The (Rancière) Negri, Antonio 5
110, 124, 127 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 100–2, 105–6,

insurrectionary speech see Butler, Judith 108, 165, 178–82,
iteration 15, 152, 161–6, 168, 170, 172 Nights of Labour, The (Rancière) 44, 46,
62, 69, 93
Jacotot, Joseph 92–4, 98, 111 normativity see Butler, Judith
Kant, Immanuel 72, 77, 100, 108 Obama, Barack 11

Kierkegaard, Søren 154–5 occupation 5–6, 17, 22, 30–1, 38, 50–5,
knowledge see aesthetic practice; and 67, 71, 144, 152
discipline Occupy movement/Occupy Wall Street 4,
49–54, 57n38, 59n109, 118, 173
Lacan, Jacques 124 oligarchy 9,18, 75, 133
Laclau, Ernesto 38–9 On the Shores of Politics (Rancière) 64
language 21, 118, 120–4, 140–5 Orange Alternative, The 151, 159–61,
left, the 3–13, 27n65, 35–6, 39, 41, 173
48, 56n32, 61–2, 64, 66–69, 72, other see Derrida, Jacques
87n34
literariness 123–5 parapolitics 63
literarity 119, 122–6, 130, 132, 134–45 Parks, Rosa 14, 30–1, 34–7, 43, 46, 51,
see also democracy 153
‘Literary Misunderstanding’ (Rancière) parody see Butler, Judith
126, 136, part-that-has-no-part 33, 40
literature ch.4 passim, seealso Derrida, Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) 48
Jacques; and discipline performativity see Butler, Judith
logocentrism see Derrida, Jacques Philosopher and his Poor, The (Rancière)
logos 16, 21, 105–6, 138, 140, 142–4, 62, 127, 129
152, 154 philosophy 2–3, 20, 79, 100, 127–32,
Lyotard, Jean-François 77 178–81; America and 98; critical
theory and 61, 79; poetry and 142;
marriage see Cavell, Stanley political philosophy 62–3, 71, 77, 97,
Marx, Karl 64, 69, 83–5, 128 128, 130; Western philosophy 67, 71,
Marxism 8, 12, 63, 64–7, 69–72, 130, 158 77, 79, 97, 129
May ’68 generation 48, 66, 117, 160 phonocentrism see Derrida, Jacques
May, Todd 56n35, Plato 62–3; and the arts 109; divisions of
Menke, Christoph: Aesthetics of Equality labour and knowledge 67–8; myth of
71; critical theory 80–2; Critical the invention of writing 121–2; philo-
Theory and Tragic Knowledge 80; sophy 140–1, 178; theotocracy 127–8;
Enlightenment 71; Permanence of writing 132; Phaedrus, The 121–2;
Revolution, The 82–4; reflexivity 80; Republic, The 16–18
revolution 82–6 plebeian revolt on the Aventine hill 31,
messianism see Derrida, Jacques 33, 133
metapolitics 63, 72; of literature 137 Podemos 4, 6, 9
Mime Collection, The 159 poeticity 15, 118–9, 141–5
Mitterrand, François 11 poetics: of philosophy 79; doubling 119;
moral perfectionism see Cavell, Stanley writing 120, 121, 133, 134, 139, 141;
Mouffe, Chantal 103 of knowledge 126, 127, 147n71; of
198 Index
linguistic acts 143, 144; of politics Rousseau Jean-Jacques 109–10
144
poetry 109, 127, 129, 131, 136, 138, San Francisco Diggers, The 159–61
141–3, 147n71 science 70, 77, 127, 136,
police order 10–13, 22–3, ch.1 passim, sensible/sensory order 151–4, 158–9,
54–5, 88n76n78, 104–5, 111; absurdity 161–2, 166, 170–1, 173,
and 151–3, 155; literature and literar- slogans 117–19, 144–5,
ity 134–6, 140; 161–2; subjectivation Sloterdijk, Peter 64–5, 86n7
and 166–7, 169, 171–3 social/protest movements 33–7, 40,

policing 22, 56n16, 74, 78, 170–1 see also 161
Foucault, Michel sociology 83
political parties 5–9, 11–13, 36, 48–50, Socrates 17, 109, 121, 128–9, 179
54 Solon 18
political philosophy see philosophy speech acts see Butler, Judith
politics 1, 3, 8, 9, 11–13, 20–3, 26n58, state: Rancière on the state 5, 11–13
ch.1. passim, 74, 80; as left and right strikes 22, 37, 42, 43, 64
72, Derrida’s 76–7; and slogans 118– subjectivation 11–13, 23, 25n2, 32–3,
19; and literature 126, 133–41, 143–5; 38, and occupation 54–5; aesthetics of
performance of politics through the 77–80; aversive thinking and 103;
absurd 151–5, 158, 166–7, 170–3 see and performance 157; in work of
also Derrida, Jacques; and Judith Butler 162, 166–74 see also
emancipation democracy; Foucault, Michel; and
‘Politics, Identification, Subjetivization’ emancipation
(Ranciere) 39 subversion see Butler, Judith
Politics of Aesthetics, The (Rancière) 122, Syriza 4, 6, 9, 11
135
‘Politics of Literature, The’ (Rancière) Taylor, Astra 50
126, 133 terror 3, 4, 7, 10, 66, 70, 84–5, 87n33
Porta, Donatella della 4 Theatre of the Absurd 156–8
postdemocracy 9–10 theotocracy 126–8, 147n69
power see Foucault, Michel
promise see Derrida, Jacques Voltaire,109–10
reflexivity 62 ‘What does it mean to be Un?’

regime see aesthetic; and representative, (Rancière) 145
remarriage comedies see Cavell, Stanley worker tailors 31, 37, 42
repetition see Butler, Judith writing see Derrida, Jacques; democracy;
representative democracy 11, 133–5, 145 and literature
representative regime 120, 121, 141,
Revising Nights of Labour (Rancière) 62 Yippies, The 160
revolution: for critical theory 82–6; see
also French Revolution. Žižek, Slavoj 5–6, 8, 43, 49, 54, 58n95,
rights 7, 13, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 63, 64, 66, 173
right-wing parties, 3, 25n8

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Drawing on recent developments in continental political thought Disorienting

Clare Woodford is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the School of

Edited by: Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and

Refugees in Extended Exile

Security Without Weapons

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy

Asylum Seekers, Sovereignty, and the Senses of the International

Global Powers of Horror

LONDON AND NEW YORK

© 2017 Clare Woodford

ISBN: 978-0-415-63429-8 (hbk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

To those who walked and showed me the ways of the waterside

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Introduction: Disorienting democracy 1

Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics

In a world marked by increasing poverty, insecurity and inequality, the work

forms of suﬀering, poverty, division and inequality. He prompts us to attend

battle. Theorising ‘politics’ as a strategy of anti-philosophy his thought shreds

Disorienting the left and the limits of communism

think beyond democracy’ and to explore and defend alternative visions of

Rejecting postdemocracy and rethinking the state of the left

Plotting our route

Parks’ 1955 protest on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama. This concerns

demonstrate our care and commitment to it through our willingness to ques-

Dis-reconnaissance in preparation for voyage

as the rich, and demonstrates all notions of ‘nobility’ as a useful invention.

Returning to the aforementioned passage from Aristotle, freedom blocks any

Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the

It is only because of ‘politics’ that we come to recognise ‘the poor’ as a salient

tioned claims about disentangling emancipation from domination return us to

Setting out from equality

28 Badiou (2010b: 5).

66 Rancière et al. (2008: 183).

Equality is central to Rancière’s ‘politics’. It is the axle that brings ‘politics’

his trial the socialist activist Auguste Blanqui appropriates ‘proletarian’ as an

‘Politics’ can be willed

think about the future of politics because although he comments on what is

The young black woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who, one day …

formulated, by her attendance at the Highlander Folk School, an education

The ordinary in the extraordinary: how to decide between

by way of qualitatively new solidarity: not just their rediscovered power

Thus it is only in such a way that a new conﬁguration of equality can be

The Scythian slaves occupy the territory of their former servitude as a

Hence, the aim of a military battle is to force your opponents to submit to

Similarly, in Laclau’s interpretation we ﬁnd concern that ‘the uncounted

refers to the institutional framework of our dominant order, or Rancière’s

‘Politics’ and eﬀectivity

passage in Dis-agreement. I quote at length:

Nothing is political in itself. But anything may become political if it gives

conclusion that a political movement seeking to bring about a moment of

This is not meant as an empty platitude, something with which a worker or

This analogy of entangling seems to make the relationship clearer. ‘Politics’,

be tangled back up elsewhere, it is a task we must attend to all the same in

Because a diﬀerent society presupposes the production of a diﬀerent

humanity, not a destructive confrontation between master or the bour-

So for Rancière, political change is the moment of subjectivation. Yet despite

Strategy: from police to ‘politics’

Although we can defend Rancière’s ‘politics’ conceptually, if we take it on

spontaneity of Occupy Wall Street. Instead of Occupy Wall Street’s focus on

we are simply referring to a grouping committed to horizontality and equality

the various working committees of OWS: the library which organized