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Samuel A. ChambersJacques Rancire and the problem of pure politics

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E JPTArticle

Jacques Ranciere and the

problem of pure politics

Samuel A. ChambersJohn Hopkins University

Abstract

Over the past decade, Jacques Rancieres writings have increasingly provoked andinspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called norma-tive theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Ranciereoffers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwartsand interrupts what Ranciere calls the police order, la police a term that encapsulatesmost of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments,and courts). Interpreters have been tempted to read Ranciere as proffering a formallypure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utteropposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancieres thinkingof politics: for Ranciere politics goes on within police orders and for this reason hestrongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could

never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In care-fully delineating the politiquepolice relation I show that the terms of Rancieres politicalwritings are multiple and multiplied. Ranciere consistently undermines any effort torender politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporarypolitical theory.

Keywords

democracy, politics, purity, Ranciere, theory, the political

Over the last ten years Jacques Rancie` res writings have had a growing impact on

English-speaking contemporary political theory, particularly in the UK and North

America. The English translation ofDisagreement prompted a trickle of articles at

the beginning of this decade that turned into a steady stream of special issues,

symposia, and edited volumes that are just now appearing at the end of the

decade.1 Rancie` res rethinking of politics has provoked and inspired those political

theorists who seek an approach to politics that avoids the abstraction of Rawlsian

Corresponding author:

Samuel A. Chambers, The Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science, 278 Mergenthaler,

3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

Email: [email protected]

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proceduralism and Habermasian deliberative democracy, while refusing to repeat

the philosophical platitudes of certain forms of post-structuralism. The power and

potential of Rancie` res approach to political philosophy lies in his ability and

willingness to treat politics afresh to come at the question of politics or the

political from an as yet unexplored angle. Rancie` re thereby gives political theorists

new material, new resources for thinking politics, simply because he redefines not

just what politics means, but what it is and what it does.2

Of course, this blade cuts both ways, since Rancieres new conceptualization of

politics has certain negative consequences as well: first, it means that much of what

political theorists study, and a great deal of what they argue, will turn out

according to Rancie` res new definition to be something other than politics,

and, second, as Rancie` re himself concludes, it means that the ancient project of

political philosophy is not the highest and noblest pursuit that both Socrates andStrauss made it out to be.3 Quite to the contrary, Rancie` re declares directly: I am

not a political philosopher.4 And he has good reasons to make such a statement,

since within the terms of his arguments political philosophy has a very particular

meaning. Rancie` re rejects the idea of taking political philosophy as a branch or

natural division of the broader field of philosophy.5 Indeed, according to Rancie` re

the telos of the political philosophy project is the very elimination of politics.6 This

claim holds, according to Rancie` re, across the canon. From Plato to Aristotle,

from Marx to Arendt, political philosophers have sought to supplant the anarchic

disorder of politics with a hierarchical order of the philosopher.7

As readers of Rancie` re have duly noted, all of this raises the question of how to

understand the relationship between what Ranciere calls politics and what we have

been calling politics for a very long time (and Ranciere renames la police).8 Given

the broad-sweeping nature of Rancie` res redefinition of the everyday activities of

politics under the category of police, it is tempting to read him as something like

an Arendtian.9 That is, in his effort to get at the specificity of politics, Rancie` re

could appear to be circumscribing a specific sphere for politics while relegating all

other phenomena to the non- or apolitical. Thus, as Arendt gives us the categories

of labour/work/action, Rancie` re would offer us politics/police. Like Arendt,Rancie` re would here be seeking a purer conception of politics; as she protests

against the encroachment of the social onto the realm of action, Rancie` re would

protest against the expansion of police orders in such a way as to crowd out pol-

itics. At the same time, one might instead be enticed to locate a third term in

Rancie` res thinking one that would either ground the other two, or transcend

them in dialectical fashion. Rather than an Arendtian pure sphere of politics, we

would thus have either a Kantian version of Rancie` re (wherein the third term

serves formally as the condition of possibility for politics/police) or a Hegelian

version (in which politics and police stage a confrontation whose synthesisdetermines history).

In this article I will first show briefly that some of Rancie` res best interpreters

(and sometimes with encouragement from Rancie` res own texts) have followed one

of these two, tempting readings and either taken Rancie` re to support a pure theory

304 European Journal of Political Theory 10(3)



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of politics or supplemented his account with a third term that would somehow

mediate the relation between politics and police. However, I will then go on to

argue that Rancie` res potential contribution to political theory lies not in

Arendtian or Hegelian veins of thought. Rancie` re rejects, perhaps above all else,

the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure,

and Rancie` res critique of the tradition of political philosophy (from Plato and

Aristotle to Marx and yes, Arendt10) centres on his resistance to the purity or

purification of politics. As I will outline very briefly, I frequently bring my reading

of Ranciere into sharper relief by contrasting it with those approaches to his work

that would (explicitly or tacitly) fold his arguments into a pure thinking of politics.

But I wish to state clearly, here at the outset, that these hermeneutic conflicts

contain important political stakes. The emphasis on impurity matters a great deal

precisely because, for Rancie` re, politics is an act of impurity, a process that resistspurification. That is, and as I will explain in this article, politics makes a supplement

possible in the face of a social order that says it has no supplement. Politics makes

visible that which a social order wishes to render invisible, and it does so in such a

way that it does not just add to what is already given. Instead, it undermines the

purity of the given. To think politics as impure in precisely this sense means, on

the one hand, to reject any model of unalloyed politics (whether it be anarchism or

Hegelianism) and, on the other, to insist that politics can never proceed as if the

other can be fully known and incorporated into the social order. In Rancie` rean

language, we are always subject to an excess of words that both makes politicspossible and prevents its closure.

I work out the support for these conclusions by reading Ranciere against not

only his critics but also some of his apparent supporters. Throughout, I insist on a

subtle and precarious understanding of the relationship, in Rancie` res work,

between la police and la politique. This sort of understanding requires a serious

contextualist engagement with the translation of Rancie` res works into English

(and curiously, also, as I will explain, the translation of his work from English

back into French), yet the delicate issues of translation have an important substan-

tive impact on how we understand Rancie` res thinking of politics. I argue thatla politique and la police do not name separate, sealed spheres that are mutually

exclusive. At the same time, I insist that the relation between them cannot be

mediated, grounded, or sublated by a third term. The terms of Rancie` res political

writings are multiple and multiplied. They can never be reduced to two (same/other)

or even to three (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), since their impurity always resists such

a reduction. Indeed, it is in those dimensions of his thought that consistently thwart

efforts (even by his own readers) to render politics pure that political theorists may

find the best resources for thinking politics anew today.

Politics as policing

Rancie` res most direct writings on politics and political philosophy written in

French in the early 1990s, but translated much more swiftly into English than his

Chambers 305



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earlier writings rapidly grabbed the attention of many political theorists for at

least two reasons. First, Rancie` re poses to himself and to his readers a question that

is clearly fundamental for most political theorists. In the preface to Disagreement

he frames that question as follows: what can be thought of specifically as poli-

tics.11 Perhaps more importantly for political theorists, and this is the second and

most powerful way that Rancie` re gains our interest, Rancie` re argues that a

response to this question force[s] a distinction upon us: we must distinguish pol-

itics from what normally goes by the name of politics and for which I propose to

reserve the term policing.12 When Ranciere refers to what normally goes by the

name of politics he means: the actions of assemblies and parliaments, the decisions

of courts, the work of politicians, all the efforts of bureaucrats. Rancie` re not only

renames all of this under a non-political heading, but also gives it a name that

surely sounds pejorative on first reading since he calls it policing.13

Rancie` re immediately clarifies his conception of police by showing that, while it

is related to the idea of uniformed officers riding in patrol cars and walking the

street, it must nevertheless be analytically distinguished from the truncheon blows

of the forces of law and order.14 Rancie` re uses police, policing, and police

order to name any order of hierarchy. And thus he invokes this broader concept

of policing to indicate both policy-making as the term in English, though not in

French, already connotes as well a wide array of economic and cultural arrange-

ments. In order to stress the broad nature of his concept of la police, Rancie` re

(uncharacteristically) emphasizes the link between his use of police and Foucaultswork. Foucault argues: first, to the extent that any police order determines hierar-

chical relationships between human beings, the police includes everything; second,

to the extent that it sets up a relationship between men and things the police order

also constitutes a material order.15

These links make it clear that Rancie` re calls on the concept of la police to

connote the vertical organization of society,16 the dividing up and distribution of

the various parts that make up the social whole. A police order is not just an

abstract order of powers (of laws or principles), it is an order of bodies that defines

the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees thatthose bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of

the visible and the sayable.17 In this key passage Rancie` re elaborates on the con-

cept of the police in terms that will become central to his later writings, since an

order of the visible and the sayable glosses Rancie` res vital notion ofle partage du

sensible usually translated as the distribution/partition of the sensible but also

connoting both sharing and division.18 Policing is a way of dividing up and making

visible the various parts of the social order.

In Ten Theses on Politics Rancie` re suggests that there are two ways of count-

ing the parts of the community. The first way of counting he calls police, and hedescribes it as follows: it only counts empirical parts actual groups defined by

differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute

the social body.19 At this point, the English translation of Ten Theses moves on

to Rancie` res next sentence (and the next way of counting). However, in the




6/25

original French, as Maria Muhle has very helpfully pointed out, Rancie` re con-

tinues: a` lexclusion de tout supplement.20 The police then, is not just a way of

counting the actual groups that make up the social order; it is a manner of counting

that excludes the possibility of any supplement to that order. There can be nothing

more to count; the police must count all.21 By asserting that the polices way of

counting must preclude from the start any remainder, Rancie` re shows again that

policing points to a particular type of partition of the sensible. This passage under

discussion immediately precedes Rancieres seventh thesis, which reads: the police

is a partition of the sensible whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supple-

ment.22 The police order distributes bodies without remainder and without exclu-

sion (a` lexclusion de tout supplement); there is nothing it does not account for,

nothing left over or external to its process of counting.

Politics as purity

Rancie` res definition of politics is now fairly well-known in contemporary theory; it

is his second way of counting the parts in any order. Having taken most of the

everyday occurrences that ordinary language refers to as politics and recategorized

them under the heading of the police, Rancie` re may then identify politics as the

very disruption of the police order. The police order is hierarchic and implicitly built

upon the assumption of inequality (an inequality based on the very differences that

legitimate the domination of the social order). The logic of politics is based on thepresupposition of equality;23 it challenges, disrupts, and consistently interrupts the

smooth flowing of the police order. Put simply, as Ranciere does in his seventh

thesis: politics is specifically opposed to the police.24 Politics is therefore dissensus:

the disruption of the given order of domination (the police order) by a political

subject that only emerges after the moment of politics, a subject that comes to exist

only through the act of politics. I will return later to a much fuller exploration of

what Rancie` re might mean by la politique, how it relates to la police, and how one

might understand it in the terms of political theory. But first I want to interrupt that

discussion with the question that Rancie` res initial definition immediately calls for:having defined politics uniquely, what does one then do with that definition?

One option one that Rancie` res own texts sometimes invite, and one that surely

has tempted some of his very best readers is to put that novel definition of politics

to work, to use the definition the way Foucault said knowledge was used, for cut-

ting.25 That is, one can take Rancie` res new definition of politics and operationalize

it as a weapon of critique. Surely Rancie` re does this himself when, in the latter half of

Disagreement he shows that neo-liberal consensus models of politics (third way

options in Europe and regular interest-group liberalism in the USA) amount to

nothing more, though surely nothing less, than orders of the police. This wouldmake Rancie` res definition of politics a tool of criticism, but it remains unclear how it

could serve more than a negative function. It would invite all those questions posed

to Foucaults work: what are your normative grounds?; what positive foundation

for actual politics does this definition provide? etc.

Chambers 307



7/25

A second choice, then particularly if one finds the normative grounds com-

plaints plausible and meaningful would be to take the unique definition of politics

and work it up into a full-blown alternative theory of politics. Rancie` re himself

eschews this option, but Todd May has picked it in his recently published book,

The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie`re, the first of what will likely be many

books in English that begin to constitute the secondary literature on Rancie` re.26

To be clear, rather than build a new theory of politics on the basis of Rancie` res

definition, May attempts to use Rancieres definition of politics as a prime resource

for elaborating the extant theory of anarchism. This leads to at least three signif-

icant implications for my effort here to get a better grip on the meaning of politics

in Rancie` res work.27

1. For May, politics and police stand in stark and ultimate opposition to oneanother. It is not enough, on Mays account, to say that politics disturbs

police orders. Rather, the ultimate (anarchist) goal must be the replacement

of the police order of domination with an anarchist freedom. May sees politics

as seeking the elimination of police orders.28 May therefore reads Rancie` re

against himself when he writes: distributions are what governments do[, b]ut

they are not what people do.29 For May, the collective anarchist action of polit-

ical agents must remain separate from la police.

2. This means, however, that unlike Rancie` re, May will insist upon laying out and

defending the ontological grounds for his anarchist vision. May appropriatesRancie` res conception of equality for his (Mays, not Rancie` res) normative

grounds. Anarchism, in Mays understanding, is committed to a substantive

form of equality, and while May wishes to use Rancieres thinking to invigorate

his vision of anarchism, this substantive conception of equality is one that

Rancie` re would never embrace. For May, equality is a goal and a ground.

For Rancie` re, equality is a presupposition that can only ever be verified, but

never actually realized. Hence the striking disparity between Mays defense of

anarchist politics, in which he argues that it is Rancie` res concept of equality

that offers a normative framework,30

and Rancie` res own assertions that equal-ity is always a one-off act, thus equality turns into the opposite once it aspires

to a place in the social.31

3. Mays commitment to anarchist politics leads him, ultimately, to a vision of

politics as singular, unique, and autochthonous. May therefore reads Rancie` re

through the logic of Z izeks supplement to Rancie` re, what Z izek calls ultra-

politics. Ultra-politics consists of the false radicalization of la mesentete

through the construction of an absolute other, where this absolutization elim-

inates the ground for any real confrontation. The other cannot be met and

therein politics itself becomes pure.

32

May writes: A democratic politics isdefined by the actions and the understandings of those who struggle, not by

the effects upon or actions taken by those the police order supports.33 For May,

politics in the sense given by anarchism becomes a pure force, utterly and

radically distinct from and in complete opposition to any and all police orders.




8/25

In his effort to appropriate Rancie` res thinking in the service of anarchist politics

May winds up defending a vision of pure anarchist politics that would obliterate

each and every police order, once and for all. While these conclusions clearly do

not line up with Rancie` res own arguments, they do call for a reinvestigation of the

status of politics within Rancie` res thinking. What does it mean to say, as Rancie` re

does, that there is no pure politics?

Here it seems helpful to recall Rancie` res critique of Plato and his deconstructive

(my word) reading of Aristotle. In the context of his reworking of Ancient Greek

thought, Ranciere consistently recurs to the theme of an impure politics, a politics

that always thwarts the order of the philosopher.34 Politics can never be pure

precisely because politics names a fundamental impurity, an essential impropriety

that renders all essentialism futile. This explains Rancie` res reading of the

Aristotelian logos as primordially tainted. As is well known, Aristotle takes logosto be the property of man that distinguishes him from the animals, those with mere

phone (voice). We know the difference between man and animal, according to

Aristotle, because of the presence of this sign.35 But Rancie` re twists this story in

a crucial way, by asking a follow-up question of Aristotle: how, through what

hermeneutics, can we interpret this sign? The logos/phone distinction is meant to

ground politics, but it turns out that we can only draw the distinction through

politics. Rancie` re writes:

The only practical difficulty [with Aristotles otherwise limpid demonstration] is inknowing which sign is required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that

the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance

rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to

recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of political-

ness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance

coming out of their mouths.36

Politics cannot be determined by the presence of the logos. Politics cannot be given

over purely as that which concerns the logos, since politics stages a more funda-mental, but always impure, conflict over the interpretation of phone and logos. In

other words, when we encounter a creature that makes sound, only politics can

determine whether we hear in that sound phone (rendering the creature a mere

animal) or logos (granting the creature a part in the political community).

Rancie` re agrees with Aristotle that the question of language is fundamental to

politics, but Rancie` res foundations are impure in many senses, they are not

really foundations. In claiming man as a political animal, Aristotle turns language

into an apolitical predeterminant of politics. Rancie` re, on the other hand, subjects

the human being to the excess of words, thereby claiming man as a literaryanimal.37 This phrase should not indicate an abiding interest in literature; instead

it describes the human animal as always exposed to that excess of words (which

Rancie` re names literarity) that Plato and every other philosopher of order had

hoped to shield us from.38

Chambers 309



9/25

But if politics has no ground (in language or elsewhere), then it cannot be self-

grounding either. Rancie` re explains that politics has no proper place nor does it

possess any natural subjects.39 We must say, then, not just that politics is not

pure, but more, that politics is that which renders impure. Rancie` re formulates the

point in many different ways. Politics is dissensus.40 Politics is a splitting into two.41

Politics is a rupture of the logic of the arkhe.42 Politics is subjectivization in the

form of disidentification.43 And with regard to the relation between politics and

police, Ranciere makes a very consistent argument: the opposition between politics

and police goes along with the statement that politics has no proper object, that

all its objects are blended with the objects of police.44 Politics cannot be uncoupled

from police; it only appears in this blended form. But because politics is not

simply impure itself but that which renders impure, this blended form must not

be confused with hybridity or the mere amalgamation of different parts. In blend-ing politics with the police Rancie` re refuses to merge the two; he gives us a blending

that is always also an othering.

Thus, while it surely seems simple to conclude that Mays Manichean view of

politics/police cannot hold politics can never be pure45 the argument proves

more complicated than such a conclusion would suggest. Impurity is, by definition,

never simple. And the impurity of politics produces a paradox for Rancie` res

thought. On the one hand, politics must not be pure. On the other, politics as

that which disrupts the police order must somehow remain other to that order;

this is why the blending is never a merging. For the disruptive force of politics tobe preserved, it must somehow remain external to the police order that it would

disrupt. Yet politics as pure externality would preclude the necessary meeting of

the heterogeneous that enacts politics.46 Hence, politics must be other to police,

but not purely other. The key to responding to this paradox is to refuse to over-

come it. Instead, Rancie` res theory of politics must be understood as thinking the

paradox, as capturing its flavour and mobilizing its force, rather than attempting to

erase or resolve it.47 To defend this sort of paradoxical argument means starting

with a rejection of the idea of pure politics one that Rancie` re has repeatedly

asserted and one that I have defended in this section but it is impossible to resthere. We must also grasp the relation between politics and police. And while we

need to understand the relation as precisely as possible, we must always also insist

that the relation itself can never be specified with precision. On the topic of this

relation, so central to Rancie` res thought, no English-language commentator on

Rancie` re has shed more light than Jean-Philippe Deranty.

Politics and the political: the three term model

Deranty has written a number of articles (in English) that provide comprehensiveoverviews of the political thought of Rancie` re. Arguing in particular that

Rancie` res work can be best understood within the context of the politics of rec-

ognition, Deranty compares Rancie` res arguments directly to the work of Axel

Honneth. In this context, I am not overly concerned with Derantys broader




10/25

arguments;48 instead, I wish to focus on a particular set of claims he makes within

them about how we should understand the relation between politics and police.

I am somewhat surprised that Derantys argument on this front has not had a

bigger impact on the English-language literature on Rancie` re, since Deranty pro-

poses a radical re-evaluation of Rancie` res account of politics precisely the issue

that animates most political theorists when they turn to Rancie` re

Deranty mentions at the end of his account (and in a footnote), a set of facts

that I think should be foregrounded. As Deranty explains, Ranciere was invited to

participate in a seminar run by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in

February 1982. This was the seminar at which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argued

for the distinction between la politique and le politique.49 Before digging into

Derantys specific reading of Rancie` re it seems prudent to take one step back.

There is a rich and varied tradition in contemporary political theory of insistingon a difference between politics or policy (la politique), on the one hand, and

something like the political (le politique), on the other. Oliver Marchart provides

perhaps the definitive history of what he calls political difference from Ricoeur,

through Arendt, Schmitt, and Mouffe, all the way to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

with side-trips into Wolin, Sartori, and others.50 Marchart assigns himself the task of

tracing the distinction between politics/the political through all of 20th-century polit-

ical theory. He sees his work as something of a definitive account and provides

lengthy commentary on most of the big names in Continental thought. His refer-

ences to Rancie` re, therefore, prove important precisely for their sparseness. Early on,Rancie` res name appears in a list of many who recognize a split between politics/the

political, but there is no direct discussion of any of Rancieres work.51 Indeed,

Ranciere receives no substantive attention until very late in the book. The few

references that do appear prove thin, but nevertheless very significant.

So how does the general understanding of political difference, which Marchart

practically defines in his opening page as the difference between la politique and

le politique, manifest itself in Rancie` re? On first mention, Marchart suggests some-

thing striking, but which goes unremarked as such in his own text. He writes: what

Rancie` re calls la politique. . .

others would call the political and this would be dis-tinguished, for Rancie` re, from politics as police.52 But the political is the English

translation ofle politique, and thus, according to Marchart, Rancie` re uses la politique

to refer to the political precisely when others would use le politique. In the terms of

Marcharts own broader work (a book on political difference) this move makes

sense, since it allows Marchart to show that while not starting with or insisting upon

the distinction politics/the political (and as I would note, while not explicitly or

formally using the term le politique at all) Rancie` re, in a way, stumbles upon,

what Marchart calls, political difference. For other thinkers this is the difference

between le politique and la politique, whereas for Rancie` re it is the difference betweenla politique and la police. And I should note that Marchart himself does not dwell on

this point Rancie` re is certainly not one of the central thinkers of political differ-

ence and therefore Marchart may well be more alert to the slippery and impure

thinking of politics in Rancie` re that I try to track and assert here.

Chambers 311



11/25

Nevertheless, in terms of my own argument, Marcharts key quote on Rancie` re

to the effect that la politique is the political for Rancie` re does seem odd, especially

since the English translators of Rancie` res key texts on politics (the works from the

early 1990s) have seen fit to translate, and do so rather consistently, la politique as

politics and not as the political. That is, for those reading Rancie` res work in

English translation, the political makes no appearance at all. Thus, I would sug-

gest that it might make more sense to leave Rancie` re out of the political difference

model entirely, rather than trying to make him fit into it in inverted fashion. The

fact that Marchart quickly moves on from Ranciere may be taken as evidence that

he too sees Rancie` re as not quite fitting the model.

In any case, things grow stranger still when one turns from Marcharts brief

comments on Rancie` re and political difference, to Marcharts reading of Z izeks

account of Rancie` re. In this context, Marchart tells us that Z izek finds his ownversion of political difference in Rancie` re, which Marchart summarizes as the

difference between la politique/police and le politique.53 This formulation,

especially in light of the earlier one, requires some sorting out. Here again the

political is distinguished from police. But whereas in the earlier version we had the

formula la politique the political, we now have a return to the more standard

le politique the political. At the same time, this second formulation requires

making la politique a synonym for the police. However, Z izeks claim54 here strikes

me as quite simply untenable since Rancie` res writings on politics consistently refer,

in French, to a difference between la politique and la police. Z izek asserts thatla politique and la police are the same, for Rancie` re, when in fact the difference

between them is the fundamental and driving force in all of Rancie`res writing on

politics. Indeed, if there is to be any obvious political difference in Ranciere it

surely is to be found here in the difference between la politique and la police that

Rancie` re discusses repeatedly and at such length. Again, one wonders whether the

project of finding politics/the political in Rancie` re is merely futile.

Perhaps, then, the distinction between politics and the political has no obvious

place in Rancie` res work. Indeed, at first glance it would seem that no commenta-

tors on, and no translators of, Rancie` re have any recourse to a distinction in hisown work in French between la politique and le politique.55 It is more than notable,

then, that Deranty not only locates this difference in Rancie` res argument, but also

makes it central to his reading of Rancie` re. Deranty structures his articulation of

Rancie` res key concepts by introducing both politics and police in a rather typical

fashion. But in defining politics as that which breaks with the order of la police,

Deranty refers explicitly to la politique. Thus, the opposing terms, according to

Deranty, are la police and la politique. This brings Deranty back to the same

dilemma that May faces: how to understand the interaction between these two

terms that are diametrically opposed? Derantys answer is striking and original:

This tension between la police and la politique creates a necessary place where they can

and must be mediated. Rancie` re calls this third term le politique. It is the place where

the underlying equality operating within social inequality is verified pragmatically in




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struggles and demands of equality. In this place is therefore also verified the wrong-

ness and wrungness of a social order that is otherwise presented as naturally ordered.

It identifies victims of the tort and those who perpetrate the tort. In simple words,

le politique is always a demand for justice. Le politique is in essence polemic.56

In a subtle yet stark departure from the standard reading, Deranty says there are

not two terms in Rancie` res conceptual frame, there are three. Le politique is the

third term. It identifies and points to that place in which the logic of domination

contained by la police meets the presumption of equality mobilized by la politique.

As Deranty explains in his later note, this reading contends that Rancie` re has taken

on board, in a serious way, the Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy-inspired distinction

between le politique and la politique. However, and utterly unsurprisingly, Rancie` re

has mobilized the distinction for distinct, if not opposite, ends. Whereas le politiquefor Nancy suggests something like the very essence of the political, which has been

eroded or lost within modernity, Rancie` re uses the third term, le politique, so as to

enable an anti-essentialist understanding of politics.57

By introducing what he calls the third term in Rancie` res thinking of politics,

Deranty offers a powerful and persuasive argument for how to interpret the rela-

tion between la police and la politique. But we still have to ask whether the reading

is supported by the text; that is, is this difference between la politique and

le politique actually present in Rancie` res writings? If the difference does exist in

French it has by no means been preserved by Rancie` res English translators: nei-ther Julie Rose, who translated La Mesentente, nor Rachel Bowlby and Davide

Panagia, who translated the Ten Theses on Politics, refer to such a distinction;

they make no effort whatsoever to call attention to a difference between le politique

and la politique. Indeed, the texts themselves include very sparse references to

le politique and make no mention of any explicit or meaningful distinction to be

drawn between la politique and le politique: for example, all of the theses in the 10

Theses use the French la politique and never le politique. All of this evidence leads

to one central question: where, if anywhere, do we find the distinction in Rancie` re

between la politique/le politique?In the case of Z izek (and to a certain extent, Marchart) we can safely say that the

distinction is imposedupon Rancie` res writings from outside in an attempt to make

his thought fit into a set of pre-made categories. But the answer in Derantys case

cannot be that simple, since Deranty does not start with political difference and

then fit Rancie` re to this mould; instead, his argument for the three terms emerges

directly from his own reading of Rancie` re. But if a strong distinction between

la politique and le politique cannot be found in either La Mesentente or Dix

the` ses sur la politique, then where did Deranty find it?

In repeatedly asking this question of myself I had begun to wonder, against mybetter judgment, if he made it up. But, of course, he did not. The answer is that

Deranty very likely found the distinction (although he does not tell his readers this)

in Rancie` res works that were originally written in English. To repeat for claritys

sake: the distinction that Deranty draws between la politique and le politique

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originates not in Rancie` res better-known writings on politics but from one or two

lectures58 that Rancie` re presented in English. In 1991 Rancie` re gave the paper

Politics, Identification, Subjectivization at a conference in the United States.

The conference, as Rancie` re tells readers in the preface to the second French edi-

tion of Aux bords du politique, was devoted to the American debate over the

question of identity, and circled around issues of nationalism and racism.59 The

conference organizers posed specific questions to the paper-givers, and Rancie` re

chose to structure his talk directly in response to one of those. In just his second

paragraph, after clearing the ground concerning his having to give the lecture in

English, a language that is not his own, Rancie` re writes: I quote from the third

point of the list of issues we were asked to address: What is the political?60 Thus,

the very idea of thinking about the political comes to Rancie` re from outside, from

what was at the time a very American-centric debate over multiculturalism, and itis voiced in a foreign language, English. Rancie` re then goes on give his answer to

the question what is the political, an answer that corresponds perfectly well with

Derantys commentary. The political is the encounter between two heterogeneous

processes. The first process Rancie` re calls policy; the second is equality.61 As

Deranty will echo more than a decade later, Rancie` re says we have 3 terms, but at

this point those terms are policy, emancipation, and the political.62 Rancie` re then

suggests we name the process of emancipation politics. Finally, if we translate

policy back into French as police,63 we wind up with the three terms that Deranty

argues for: la police, la politique, and le politique. La politique is that logic ofequality that encounters the order of domination constituted by la police; le poli-

tique is the ground or space of such an encounter.

Nonetheless, the logic here clearly looks less than straightforward, and thus I

remain skeptical that the three terms approach of both Deranty and the lecturer-

in-English, Rancie` re, captures adequately the thinking of politics that Rancie` res

original French texts provide. Before complicating matters with the help of just

those texts, I should bring the story of political difference in Rancie` re to some sort

of close. First, Rancie` re does mention the difference between politics and the polit-

ical in other places. In another lecture also given in English, in 2003, Rancie` rerefers directly to the previous talk: in an earlier text, I proposed to give the name of

the political to the field of encounter and confusion between the process of

politics and the process of police.64 Yet this lecture does not work with the politics/

political distinction and certainly does not maintain a three terms model; rather,

it invokes this earlier work in order to make the point, which I have already

discussed, that politics has no proper object.65

I would hypothesize that the idea of three terms in Rancie` re was probably

instantiated not by these two lectures given in English (one a minor work in

Rancie` res corpus and one still unpublished), but by Rancie` res decision to havethe earlier lecture translated into French and included in the second French edition

of Aux bords du politique. The 1991 lecture was translated into French so as to

make the distinction between la politique and le politique perfectly clear; indeed, in

that edition the editor chose to italicize the le and la that precede politique in order




14/25

to emphasize the political difference. More than this, the new structure for this

second edition of the very popular book (the first edition included Rancie` res ear-

liest writings centered most directly on politics, the ones upon which La Mesentente

directly built) placed the 1991 lecture at the centre of a new part one. Part one was

titled Du politique a` la politique, from the political to politics. Finally, Rancie` re

wrote a new preface for the second edition in which he explicitly discusses, for the

first (and to my knowledge, only) time in French, the difference between la politique

and le politique. If all that were not enough to make it seem as if this distinction had

always been central to Rancieres thinking concerning politics, the blurb on the

back of the book excerpts the new preface at just the place where it specifies the

distinction between le politique and la politique. The blurb reads:

If le politique imposes itself as an object of philosophical thought, it is without doubt

that this neutral adjective conveniently signifies a variation with the substance of

la politique, in its ordinary sense of a fight of the parties over power and the exercise

of that power. To speak of le politique and not la politique indicates the principles of

law, power, and community and not the activities of government.66

It seems quite likely, then, that a reader picking up Rancie` res work in French at

some point over the past decade would come away with the impression that the

difference between la politique and le politique had an important role to play in his

thinking of politics. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the vast majority ofRancie` res writing on politics maintain no such distinction. And it seems crucial

to note here that Rancieres most important works on politics from the 1990s were

all produced after the 1991 lecture that had suggested three terms (in English), yet

Rancie` re did not bother to fold that terminology into La Mesentente clearly the

central text of Rancie` res devoted to politics and engaged with the tradition of

political philosophy. I therefore contend that there is something very problematic

about making the three terms of politics fundamental to ones interpretation of

Rancie` re. To do so would be to take the French translation of one short lecture

coupled with an eight-page preface to a second edition of a collection of essays, anduse those texts as some sort of central hermeneutic guidebook allowing one to

reinterpret all of Rancie` res broad corpus on politics. Without any further

reason to think, or evidence to support the idea, that le politique mediates

la politique and la police in Rancie` res main texts, it seems a mistake to structure

an argument about Rancie` res conception of politics around this approach (not to

mention that there seems no evidence that Rancie` re himself wishes to reinterpret

his past works through this lens; since the 1998 preface, there have been no more

writings to my knowledge that maintain a difference between la politique and

le politique).

67

I must stress, however, that my resistance to the idea that le politique provides a

ground or space of encounter between la police and la politique does not rest only a

contextualist argument concerning the production and presentation of these texts.

While I contend that the contextualist work provides reasons to be wary, I also

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argue that the insertion of the third term into Rancie` res writings fails to account

for the subtlety and power of his thinking of politics. It actually blunts the inci-

siveness of his conception of la politique to conceive of it within the three-term

model. To make le politique into the space where the fight of politics is played out,

returns Rancie` re far too close to an Arendtian model. Rancie` re always resists the

idea of a sphere of action, and the promotion of le politique to a mediating,

grounding term runs the risk of transforming Rancie` res conception of politics

into a specific sort of act that must occur in its proper space.68 Indeed, even in

its formal logical structure, the three terms approach proves overly symmetrical

and balanced for a thinker who consistently insists on a lack of balance who

thinks in and through paradox, not symmetry. The three terms model creates a set

of proper spheres for Rancie` res concepts, when those concepts are always designed

to thwart the idea of proper spheres.69

The doubling of politics: democratic politics within the

police order

To prevent closing down Rancie` res thinking of politics by assimilating it to such a

model, I will build directly on Derantys arguments, but I want to twist or wring

them in a particular way. As Deranty stresses, the wrongness that politics asserts

in the face of a police order is also a wrungness a twisting or torsion of the police

order and its logic of inequality. In other words, I am trying to apply to Derantysown reading the anti-ontological torsion that Deranty so helpfully identifies in

Rancieres work. Thus I contend that there are not really three distinct terms in

Rancieres argument. If there were three terms, then all three of them could be

pure: a realm of domination (police), a realm of dissensus (politics), and a ground

upon which they meet (the political). But this would be to found an essential

conception of politics, le politique, as an ontological ground. This, as Deranty

stresses and as I have been arguing throughout this article, could not be fur-

ther from Rancie` res project. As Rancie` re consistently underlines, he avoids all

ontology.70

Hence my argument: we do not have three terms (police, politics, thepolitical) but merely a doubling of one of the two terms.71

Politics is doubled, always and already. It is doubled in that it is never singular

and never pure always and already because the doubling is not a secondary

process that happens to a pre-given politics, but an essential feature of la politique

in the first place. Politics, like the logos, is subject to an original taint split from

itself, split into two from the beginning, as Rancie` re says politics must be.72 Thus,

politics cannot be pure in Rancie` res thought, nor can there be a clear political

difference in his work (la politique/le politique) since in his very writings, politics

doubles itself; that is, we cannot distinguish le politique from la politique, sinceneither is singular.73 This argument operates on two distinct, yet inextricably

linked levels.

First, I make the case for a doubled politics as a solution of sorts to the

dilemma of how to translate which is nothing other than the question of how




16/25

to read Rancie` re: ifla politique is never simply itself (never pure, never one) then

we can understand how it is both the disruptive other to the police order and

somehow simultaneously a part of the police order. La politique is always ultimately

opposed to and transformative of la police, but since the former is never simply

itself, it cannot be taken to be wholly external to and outside of the latter. In

grasping for a third term, le politique, Deranty actually goes some distance

toward bringing this dimension of doubling into play in Rancie` res work, but I

insist on the crucial importance of the doubling of la politique, rather than the

preservation of its purity through the introduction of a third term.

However, and secondly, this argument cannot be confined to the level of her-

meneutic debates or semantics (even if it arises there, even if that is the location

from which we can begin to make the argument in the first place). The notion of a

doubled politics not only solves interpretive problems but also casts a great deal oflight on Rancie` res conception of politics on, as I said in the opening, not just

what it means but what it does. Rancie` re does not, a` la Nancy and others, wish to

separate something like the political from politics; nor does he seek to establish

the political as more originary, more fundamental to politics. For these reasons

Deranty is too quick to assume that le politique is the necessary place for politics

and police to meet. Such a rendering of Rancie` res work does not convey clearly

enough what Deranty refers to in the very next paragraph as the anti-ontological

shape of his argument.74 Perhaps, as Deranty suggests, the difference between

le politique and la politique must be attended to, but the difference cannot bedichotomized.75 Indeed, the potential ambiguity of politics in Rancie` res

English-translation texts helps to convey something of the impurity of politics

that Ranciere himself insists upon (interestingly, in English).76 If there can be

said to be such a thing as political difference in Rancie` re, then it is surely this

doubling of politics itself, rendering it always already impure.77

The three-term model tends, as I have shown, to purify politics. In addition, that

approach also seems to ignore quite blatantly a crucial point that Rancie` re himself

repeatedly makes: politics and police meet within the police order itself. Politics goes

on in the only place where it can go on: within the social formation where it occurs,i.e. within the space of the police order. And politics must be doubled precisely

because of this fact about its location, because politics is that which opposes the

terms of the police order but does so within its terms. Only an impure form of

politics could do such a thing. There is no pure politics.78 This means that in

trying to grasp the meaning and importance of Rancie` res conception of politics as

that which irrupts into any given police order, we must see the interconnected

nature of the two. In a crucial passage that responds to critics who would (mis)read

him as proposing the purity of politics, Rancie` re writes (and I comment in brack-

ets): politics does not stem from a place outside of the police. There is no placeoutside of the police. [And hence there need not be a third place where politics and

police meet all meeting is conflict within the police order itself.] But there are

conflicting ways of doing [sic] with the places that it allocates: of relocating,

reshaping, or redoubling them.79 I italicize Rancie` res use of redoubling since

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the word itself is a doubling of double, connecting directly to my broader argument

about how to understand his conception of politics. To remain both impure and

non-dialectical (politics impurities cannot merely be waiting to be removed

through a process of sublation), politics must always be redoubled in this way.80

Reading la politique as doubled while arguing for a doubling of politics in dem-

ocratic politics, brings to light both the impurity of politics and the inherent oppo-

sition between politics and police. Thus, if le politique plays a role in Rancie` res

theory, it cannot be a grounding role, that of providing a space for politics.

Ranciere refutes this idea directly: As for the exceptionality of politics, it has no

specific place. Politics takes place in the space of the police [again, no third space

is needed], by rephrasing and restaging social issues, police problems and so on.81

The encounter between la politique and la police is never definitive, never final, and

never produces a new stage of history. It is always a renegotiation of the verypolice order in which we live.82

And in the end, democratic politics can do nothing else than this: renegotiate the

police order. Those readers of Rancie` re who see in (or project into) his works a

radical alternative to every form of politics as we know and have known it, will find

this conclusion utterly unsatisfying. May and others want Rancie` re to provide what

a certain form of orthodox Marxism once offered: a utopianism stripped of the

label utopian, a vision for a politics wholly other to what lies before us in our own

political conjuncture. In a word, hope. But a particular kind of hope: a pure hope,

untainted by the unruliness of democracy. And yet, nothing could be further fromRancie` res own vision of democracy: for him, unruliness is precisely what democ-

racy offers. But that is not all it offers, for in the unruliness of democracy we can

locate the verification of equality through the excess of words,83 and the only

genuine hope there is: not the hope that politics will save us, but that democratic

politics will change what is, will alter what is given.

For this reason, what we might call, even in the face of his own reluctance to

give it such a name, Rancie` res political theory, must be a particular kind of

political theory.84 Not despite, but due to the nature of its radical commitments

to equality and the people, this is not a full-blown theory of politics or the polit-ical. Rancie` re has very recently written (speaking of his own work in the third

person): he never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature,

cinema or anything else. He thinks that there is already a good deal of them and he

loves trees enough to avoid destroying them to add one more theory to all those

available on the market.85 These statements make it obvious that Rancie` res think-

ing of politics resists the trajectory of an anarchist project, or any other pure,

formal account of what politics should be or become. But this is not just because

Rancie` re has chosen to do something else other than produce a theory of politics.

It is because democratic politics is never a pure politics.

86

To insist that politics isnot pure is surely to reject the idea of a formal political theory that would lay

normative grounds or predict historical processes. As Rancie` re puts it, I am not

saying this is how all of us must think and act.87 But it is by no means to reject

political theory in a more broadly conceived form, since a commitment to the




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impurity of politics is a commitment to another task, a reraising of the question

How are we to reinvent politics?88

A Rancie` rean reinvention of politics would have to start with the hierarchy,

inequality, and structural domination of all social orders (la police). Deranty argues

that Rancie` re has borrowed the metaphor of society as a gravitational order, a

kind of Aristotelian nature, where objects always end up falling to their proper

places.89 I would stress, however, that while Rancie` re mentions such a metaphor

he always identifies it as a metaphor. Those committed to the hierarchy of the police

order may wish to literalize this metaphor, to naturalize the inequality of a given

police order. But, in a supplement to Rancie` res arguments about the presuppo-

sition of equality, we can argue that police orders are built upon an assumption of

inequality. Those stultifiers whose existence depends upon that presumption will

try to verify it repeatedly by demonstrating their own superior intelligences, andtheir own repeated presuppositions of inequality mean that the social order is

always in fact marked by domination.

But this is not to say that there is anything at all natural about the domination

of the social order. And the verification of the equality of intelligences will always

expose the wrong of the police order. There is nothing natural about inequality; it is

nothing like gravity, despite the metaphor. As Rancie` re himself says in The

Ignorant Schoolmaster: convention alone can reign in the social order.90 Thus,

to call the social order a quasi-natural order, as Deranty does, requires us to put

enormous weight and repeated emphasis on the quasi- part: the social order passesitself off as natural; it has recourse to the metaphor of gravity. But natural it is not.

A reinvented, impure politics would remain committed to the verification of the

principle of equality a principle that can only be verified, never made substantial

in the face of continued domination of the police order in which we do, and

must, live.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was given at the American Political Science annual meetingin Toronto, in Sept. 2009; I am deeply indebted to my fellow panelists and audience mem-

bers for their insights and suggestions, especially Lisa Disch, Davide Panagia, Mike Shapiro,

and John Zumbrunnen. For earlier engagements with Rancie` res thought on the police, I am

grateful to the graduate students in my 2009 seminars and to Andrew Schaap. I am pleased

to note my great appreciation for the efforts of two anonymous reviewers for EJPTfor their

very helpful comments and suggestions. For help with translations, I owe another debt to

Rebecca Brown. Finally, for her careful and inspiring reading of an earlier draft, I give my

sincere thanks to Jane Bennett.

1. Jacques Rancie` re (1999) [1995] Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. In this article I cite a large number of the early texts

on Rancie` re; nonetheless there are a few that I do not address directly that are certainly

important contributions. They include: Michael Dillon (2003) (De)void of Politics? A

Response to Jacques Rancie` res Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 6(4); Kirstie

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McClure (2003) Disconnections, connections, and questions: Reflections on Jacques

Rancie` res Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 6(4); Aamir Mufti (2003)

Reading Jacques Rancie` res Ten Theses on Politics: After September 11th, Theory

and Event 6(4); Paolo Palladino and Tiago Moreira (2006) On Silence and theConstitution of the Political Community, Theory and Event 9(2). I also address some

of the more recent literature, but much of it has only just appeared or remains in press.

Here I would wish to emphasize two recent special issues in Parallax (15(3), 2009) and

Borderlands (8(2), 2009) and two forthcoming volumes: Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.)

(2010) Jacques Rancie`re: Key Concepts. London: Acumen. Paul Bowman and Richard

Stamp (eds) (2010) Reading Rancie`re. London: Continuum.

2. I put the point this way because for Rancie` re the question of politics is not a question of

definition or even of ontology, but always a question of interruptions, interventions or

effects. Politics is not; politics disrupts.

3. Leo Strauss (1959) What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies. Glencoe, IL: FreePress.

4. Jacques Rancie` re (2003) Comment and Responses, Theory and Event 6(4): para. 10.

5. Rancie` re (n. 1), pp. ix, 61.

6. This is the first of many places where my reading of Rancie` re might be seen to intersect

with the thought of Alain Badiou. In this case, Badiou and Rancie` re share a harsh

condemnation of political philosophy. For Rancie` re this judgement reflects a funda-

mental conflict between philosophy and politics (and Rancie` re sides with politics in this

dispute) whereas for Badiou the problem of political philosophy consists in a misun-

derstanding of the proper role of philosophy in relation to politics. Alain Badiou (2005)

Metapolitics, tr. Jason Barker, p. 118. London: Verso. In discussing so-called politicaldifference in the text, one could also broach an analysis of the shared but distinct

special status that Rancie` re and Badiou both give to la politique. On this point, see

Marcharts very helpful chapter on Badiou, specifically the argument concerning

Badiou and Rancie` res shared reversal of the privileging of the political over politics

within Marcharts broader exploration of political difference. Oliver Marchart (2007)

Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and

Laclau, pp. 11920. Edinburgh University Press. In general, further exploration of the

similarities, and radical differences, between Badiou and Rancie` re would take me too

far afield within this article, but I would suggest that Marcharts analysis combined with

the exegesis I offer here (along, of course, with Badious own chapters on Rancie` re inMetapolitics) might help set the stage for future work on Rancie` re and Badiou. See also

Nina Power (2009) Which Equality? Badiou and Rancie` re in Light of Ludwig

Feuerbach, Parallax 15(3): 6380.

7. Jacques Rancie` re (1974) La lecon dAlthusser. Paris: Gallimard. Jacques Rancie` re

(2008) Misadventures in Critical Thinking, unpublished manuscript.

8. Alex Thomson (2003) Re-Placing the Opposition: Rancie` re and Derrida, paper given

at Fidelity to the Disagreement, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Jeremy

Valentine (2005) Rancie` re and Contemporary Political Problems, Paragraph 28(1):

4660.

9. Hannah Arendt (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press. Andrew Schaap (2010) The Rights of Political Animals: Jacques

Rancie` res Critique of Hannah Arendt, European Journal of Political Theory 9(4): 2245.

10. On this point Rancie` re is emphatic: I wrote the Ten Theses on Politics primarily as a

critique of the Arendtian idea of a specific political sphere and a political way of life.




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Jacques Rancie` re (2003) The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and aesthetics, p. 2,

presented at Fidelity to the Disagreement, Goldsmiths College, University of

London, London.

11. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. xiii; emphasis added.12. Ibid.; emphasis in original.

13. Early commentary on Rancie` res thinking with regard to politics has been so caught up

in his distinctive definition of politics as to lead to relative neglect of his concept of

la police.

14. Ibid. p. 28.

15. Michel Foucault (1979) Omnes et Singulatum, The Tanner Lectures on Human

Values, Stanford, CA.

16. I call this a vertical organization to express Rancie` res insistence on thinking social

order as an order of hierarchy and domination. See Jane Bennett (2010) Vibrant

Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Onemight wonder whether police order describes any social order, whether the term is

broad enough to include spontaneous and horizontal ordering. Rancie` re simply does

not address these issues; for him, the social order is always structured hierarchically.

But we might go on to say, within Rancie` rean terms, that the horizontal dimensions of a

social order are produced by politics.

17. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. 29; emphasis added.

18. For an argument that shows how partage can (and must) be both sharing and division,

see Davide Panagia (2010) Partage du sensible, in Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.), Jacques

Rancie`re: Key Concepts. London: Acumen.

19. Jacques Rancie` re (2001) Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 5(3): para. 19.20. Jacques Rancie` re (1998) Aux bords du politique., p. 176. Paris: La Fabrique; all trans-

lations from this edition are mine. Cf. Maria Muhle (2007) Politics, Police and Power

between Foucault and Rancie` re, unpublished manuscript, p. 4.

21. I agree completely with Muhle (n. 20), when she goes on to suggest that the phrase left

out of the English translation is actually the central piece of Rancie` res argument,

precisely because what politics does, is to make this supplement possible, p. 4.

22. Rancie` re (n. 19), para. 19.

23. The phrase presupposition of equality may sound like it needs a qualifier: social

equality, bodily equality, existential equality? But as I will explain, for Rancie` re equality

is never substantive, and it is for just this reason that it cannot have a qualifier.24. Rancie` re (n. 19), para. 19.

25. Michel Foucault (1984) The Foucault Reader, p. 88. New York: Pantheon Books.

26. Todd May (2008) The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie`re: Creating Equality.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

27. The three points condense and summarize certain elements of a much longer engage-

ment of mine with Mays book. Samuel A. Chambers (2010) The Politics of the Police:

From Neoliberalism, to Anarchism, and Back to Democracy, in Bowman and Stamp

(n. 1).

28. May (n. 26), p. 43, argues that in the end, the goal of policing is precisely that of

eliminating politics. This is either a misreading of Rancie` re or a significant departurefrom his argument, since Rancie` re simply never says such a thing about police orders or

policing (though he does say it about political philosophy, which is precisely the project

of eliminating politics in favour of only policing). For the context of Mays anarchism,

see Todd May (1994) The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.

Chambers 321



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University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. See also Colin Ward (1982)

Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom Press.

29. May (n. 26), p. 47; emphasis added.

30. Ibid. p. 128.31. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. 34.

32. Slavoj Z izek (2005) The Lesson of Rancie` re, in Gabriel Rockhill (ed.), The Politics of

Aesthetics, p. 71. New York: Continuum. Z izek seems to be offering a very subtle and

wholly unelaborated critique of Rancie` re in this afterword that otherwise remains full

of praise. Early in the essay Z izek provides his supplement in the form of an ultra-

politics that clearly depends upon making politics so pure as to be meaningless, and

then, later in the essay, Z izek somewhat casually refers to Rancie` re as one of the post-

Althusserian partisans of pure politics (p. 75). As I will show, Rancie` re flatly and

forceful denies the very idea of a pure politics. And Rancie` re has recently deflected

Z izeks implicit critique by denying the use of the concept post-politics, which Z izekwrongly attributes to him. Jacques Rancie` re (2009) A Few Remarks on the Method of

Jacques Rancie` re, Parallax 15(3): 11423, p. 116. For a reading that follows Z izeks

post-politics line and that offers a strong critique of Rancie` res privileging of demo-

cratic politics, see Jodi Dean (2009) Politics without Politics, Parallax 15(3): 2036.

For a powerful reading of Z izek on Rancie` re, see Valentine (n. 8).

33. May (n. 26), p. 72; emphasis added.

34. Jacques Rancie` re (2004) The Philosopher and his Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

35. Aristotle (1958) Politics, tr. Ernest Barker, p. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

36. Rancie` re (n. 19), para. 21; cf. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. 2.37. Samuel Chambers (2005) The Politics of Literarity, Theory and Event 8(3): 1843.

Davide Panagia (2006) The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press. Mark Robson (2005) Jacques Rancie` res Aesthetic Communities,

Paragraph 28(1): 7795. Mark Robson (2009) A Literary Animal: Rancie` re,

Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy, Parallax 15(3): 88101.

38. Jacques Rancie` re (2000) Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancie` re,

Diacritics 30(2): 11326, p. 115. Cf. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. 37.

39. Rancie` re (n. 19), para. 25.

40. Ibid. para. 24. Cf. Jacques Rancie` re (n. 10).

41. Jacques Rancie` re (2006) Hatred of Democracy, p. 61. London: Verso.42. Rancie` re (n. 19), para. 8.

43. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. 37. Jacques Rancie` re (2007) What does it Mean to be Un,

Continuum 21(4): 55969, pp. 55960. Jacques Rancie` re (1995) [1991] Politics,

Identification, Subjectivization, in John Rajchman (ed.)The Identity in Question,

pp. 6370. New York: Routledge.

44. Rancie` re (n. 10), p. 4; emphasis added.

45. Of course, we can already find a solid body of secondary literature that makes this case

convincingly. In addition to Muhle (n. 20) and Panagia (n. 37), see Gabriel Rockhill (2004)

The Silent Revolution, Substance 33(1): 5476. As I noted early on, Mays book is the first

full-length monograph in English specifically devoted to Rancie` re as a political thinker. Hiswork makes a wonderful contribution both for its specific readings and arguments and, in

general, for starting to build a secondary literature, which has remained quite sparse up to

now. For just these reasons, however, I find it rather startling that May himself pays no

attention whatsoever to the political theory literature, in English, that already exists on




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Rancie` re. Derantys work, in particular, provides crucial insights to Rancie` res broader

project, and Deranty published more than five years ago in two of the top political theory

journals. In addition, Theory and Event published not only individual articles on Rancie` re,

but also two separate symposia on his work, both of which were available more than fiveyears before the appearance of Mays book. I note this lack of attention to any secondary

literature not for the sake of picking nits, but because Mays rich text might have been so

much richer had it worked with, built from and spoken to some of these earlier, important

texts.

46. Rancie` re (n. 1), p. 32.

47. Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) Rancie` re and Contemporary Political Ontology, Theory

and Event 6(4). Deranty points out that Rancie` res entire project in political philosophy

has a paradoxical quality to it, in that Rancie` re claims that political philosophy is a

logical impossibility (para. 2).

48. Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) Jacques Rancie` res Contribution to the Ethics ofRecognition, Political Theory 31(1): 13656. Though it should be noted that the ren-

dering Deranty gives of Rancie` res arguments might be traced back to his effort to link

Rancie` re up with the tradition of the politics of recognition. Surely Hegel is the most

prominent theorist in both that tradition and in the tradition of dialectical thought

(and, anecdotally, Hegel is the other author upon whom Deranty has focused most of

his work). Moreover, although Deranty would never reduce Rancie` res thought to the

dialectic, he still sees Rancie` res conception of politics within the terms of the dialectic.

He refers, for example, to the dialectic between equality and inequality that is

punctuated by Rancie` rean politics (p. 153).

49. Deranty (n. 47), n. 27. For non-native French speakers such as myself, I would interrupthere to cover the basics: this distinction, in French, is first of all nothing more than the

difference between feminine and masculine and thus becomes no difference at all when

translated into the genderless English language. In regular French usage, la politique

connotes more of the everyday business of politics (e.g. department politics as used in

English) while le politique suggests something broader, more systematic, more

philosophical.

50. Marchart (n. 6).

51. Ibid. p. 7.

52. Ibid. p. 120.

53. Ibid. p. 145.54. And it does seem to be Z izeks claim and not a misreading by Marchart as Z izek

opens his reading of Rancie` re in The Ticklish Subject by referring to la politique/police

as a singular entity that would be perturbed by a political mode of rebellion. Slavoj

Z izek (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p. 172.

London: Verso.

55. In his translators introduction Gabriel Rockhill does make reference, if only in passing,

to a distinction between politics and the political, but he gives no French translation

of those terms in his English introduction and his translation of the French marks no

distinction either: Jacques Rancie` re (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics. London:

Continuum. I return to this point in the text.56. Deranty (n. 47), para. 6, italics original, underlining mine.

57. Ibid. n. 27.

58. Or, the French translations thereof.

59. Rancie` re (n. 20), p. 13.

Chambers 323



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60. Rancie` re (1995, in n. 43), p. 63. The French translation entirely leaves out these first two

paragraphs, and begins instead with Rancie` re simply asking, of himself and the reader,

Quest-ce que le politique, nous est-il demande? (Rancie` re, n. 20, p. 83).

61. Rancie` re (1995, in n. 43), p. 63.62. Ibid. p. 64. Cf. Deranty (n. 47), para. 6.

63. It seems plausible to make this move, but technically it is surely a mistranslation, since

any English to French dictionary will give la politique as the translation for policy. Here

we see even more starkly that in this lecture Rancie` re proposes differences that really

only hold in English. A direct translation back into French of the English Rancie` re uses

would give us the difference between la politique and la politique.

64. Rancie` re (n. 10), p. 4.

65. Ibid.

66. Rancie` re (n. 20), p. 10. Even here, where Rancie` re explicitly clarifies what might be at

stake for him in the difference between la politique and le politique we still see nothinglike the stark political difference (as Marchart finds in so many other authors) nor a

clear delineation of three terms as suggested in Derantys work.

67. My goal here is not to provide some sort of definitive refutation of Deranty. Indeed,

Deranty is not necessarily wrong in his approach to Rancie` re, but I worry that his

presentation of the three terms in Rancie` re can have a somewhat distorting effect, parti-

cularly for those readers who do not have easy access to Rancie` res writings in French.

68. Rancie` re (n. 19), para. 4; Cf. Rancie` re (n. 10), p. 3.

69. Another way of grasping the logic here would be to emphasize the terms ofdialectics.

Numerous commentators on Rancie` re have either addressed the issue of dialectical

thinking in Rancie` re directly (Thomson (n. 8); cf. Chambers (n. 27)), applied dialecticsto Rancie` re (Z izek (n. 32)), or offered a putatively Rancie` rean understanding of politics

that obeyed its own dialectical logic (May (n. 26)). For the purposes of my specific

argument here, the question of dialectics is not the essential one, since what matters,

ultimately, is whether or not politics can be rendered pure, or if politics is that which

always renders itself (through its doubling) and its other, impure. A dialectical over-

coming produces a purified result, so in that sense a dialectical approach to Rancie` re

would arrive at the same problematic end point (telos) of a purified politics. For the

sake of clarity my argument here largely avoids the language of dialectics.

70. Rancie` re (n. 10). Bram Ieven (2009) Heteroreductives: Rancie` res disagreement with

ontology, Parallax 15(3): 5062. Rancie` re elaborates on this point in his recent essay,written in the third person, A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancie` re. He

explains: Most of those who conceptualize politics today do it on the basis of a general

theory of the subject, if not on the basis of a general ontology. But Rancie re argues that

he cannot make any deduction from a theory of being as being to the understanding of

politics, art or literature. The reason, he says, is that he knows nothing about what

being as being may be. Thats why he had to manage with his own resources which are

not that much. Since he cannot deduce politics from any ontological principle, he chose

to investigate it out of its limits, he means out of the situations in which its birth or its

disappearance are staged (Rancie` re (n. 32), p. 117).

71. In the recent essay on method, Rancie` re (n. 32) refers to a doubling up of the notion ofpolitics (p. 121). And it seems more than anecdotal to point out that this essay,

specifically devoted to method and dealing at length with the question of political

theory, makes no mention whatsoever of a difference between politics and the political

(nor one between la politique and le politique).




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72. Rancie` re (n. 41), p. 61.

73. This doubling may disappear in English translations if and when they lose a sense of

any subtle differences between la politique and le politique when the act of translation

turns these two terms into the oneness of the English politics. But it would be just aswrong for English translators to construct a third term i.e. the political and insist

on its appearance whenever Rancie` re writes le politique. This reading is further sup-

ported by the fact that Rancie` res own references to a distinction only emerge in

English. Rancie` re himself thereby suggests a doubling of

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