Jacques Rancière and the dramaturgy of law

KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture, 2018

The edited volume Rancière and Law by Mónica López Lerma and Julen Etxabe collects a set of approaches to thinking about law and legal problems via the work of Jacques Rancière. Rather than bringing together his explicit statements on law, they try to transfer his way(s) of thinking to the field of legal theory. Here special attention is drawn to Rancière's differentiation of "police" , as a certain fixed order, and "politics" , as acts disrupting this order. Without placing law on one of these sides exclusively, instead its ambiguous state between these opposing strands is delineated in various attempts, ranging from case studies in the history of ideas to the field of aesthetics. Thus, the volume sheds an original light on legal problems and inner conflicts developed through a Rancièrean lens.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2021

In this paper, I explore the idea of justice in relation to Rancière's key theoretical insightsand ask whether Rancière has a concept of justice in his own work. The overarching concern that motivates this paper is whether Rancière does provide us with the tools to properly conceptualize the demands for justice that occur within contemporary social movements, or whether we must look elsewhere for such a conceptual framework.

International Journal of Philosophy, 2019

An-arché in the thinking of politics and aesthetics beyond the tradition of "political philosophy" of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt in 20. century, or in contact with the ideas of political emancipation by Joseph Jacotot, and Karl Marx and anarchism, marks the theory of politics as a disagreement (mésentente) in the writings of Jacques Rancière. The intention of this text is to show how and in what way the thinking of the political should confront to the philosophy of politics who always take care theoretically about the politics of norms, postulates and rules of action. Since Rancière believes that political preceded by politics as a police or regime of the oligarchic law in contemporary liberal democracies, and it should be a matter of radical equality among citizens, then it is the fundamental problem of determining politics in an attempt to think of anarché. In this contingency, we are doomed to a constant struggle with the order of inequalities and chaos in its own vagueness. That must be a reason why we use the word "mysticism" for what comes out of the state in-between two ways of comprehending a politics: (1) as the power of a hierarchically predicated society on which a state is constructed and (2) as a spontaneous struggle for democracy. The true politics of the equality must face what lies in its own bargain. And that is the powerful and chaotic an-arché. The paradox and aporia are not that democracy and freedom are derived from this principle without principles. Anyway, the scandal that rules in neoliberal oligarchy represents a confirmation of the same an-arché. For this reason, its archi-politics, para-politics and meta-politics are "the cunning of reason" of a perverted order of the world where the power of the "police" sets limits to the "politics" of freedom and not vice versa. Contemporary oligarchy is based in this an-arché-ic model of chaos and ambiguity in all its visible and invisible areas of action, from the management of the economy to marketing policy. But the problem with Rancière's metapolitics has been seen from the beginning to be a problem of the impossibility of political without the articulation of power. Equality without power remains unfulfilled by the demands of the "people" as temporary demos.

In the work of Jacques Rancière one encounters a welcome and uncompromising return to the question of the political, or politics proper, as opposed to politics in the ordinary sense of the word. For Rancière, the political is something irreducible, where the fundamental equality of all human subjects manifests itself, while customary politics is the perversion of the political in as far as it covers up this equality and institutes in its place a hierarchical arrangement of the polis. Hence Rancière's claim that customary politics is the work of what he calls the " police " (not with the usual meaning), which here represents the agency that parcels out the polis according to the interests of those who have a " part " in it. Rancière's concern, however, is for the part of the de-mos, or those " with no part " , who are at once excluded from politics and immanent to it as its constant other, or shadow. This paper explores the implications of Rancière's radicalisation of the notion of the " political " – or " politics " in the sense of the democratic pursuit of equality – for the hierarchical, consensual realm of (pseudo-) politics under the " police " , and for the prospects of democracy, especially considering the role of what Rancière calls " dissensus " .

In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

Epistemological, Ethical and Political Issues in Modern Philosophy, 2018

Eray Yag anak / Ahmet Umut Hacıfevziog lu (eds.) Epistemological, Ethical and Political Issues in Modern Philosophy This edited collection of essays aims to acquaint the reader with different aspects of the contemporary philosophy. The contributors to this book provide a genuinely scholarly basis for the understanding of the philosophical issues on epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. Each author provides an in-depth analysis of various aspects of the problems, such as democracy, ground of the law, epistemology of ignorance, public and private sphere distinction.

This paper analyses the relation between Jacques Rancière’s idea of ‘politics as aesthetics’ and the Kantian sublime. For Rancière, politics and aesthetics are not simply analogical; they share a common mechanism. Yet despite this virtual amalgamation, Rancière repeatedly rejects both the sublime itself and the Kantian subdivision of the aesthetic into the beautiful and the sublime. I claim that Rancière’s explicit rejection of the sublime and his reduction of the aesthetic to the beautiful diminish the relevance of his conception of politics to contemporary political issues and subjectivities and undermine its own logic. In order to establish a feasible link between Rancière and Kantian aesthetics, I trace Rancière’s idea of politics back to Hannah Arendt’s late political interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. While Arendt’s idea of politics is usually associated with the Kantian analytic of the beautiful, I demonstrate that Rancière’s more dissensual idea can be linked to the analytic of the sublime and that, despite his explicit rejection, it implicitly incorporates some of its aspects. I then link this discrepancy to the conflict Kant identifies between political action and moral judgement in the face of dramatic political events. Arendt’s solution of making a distinction between political actors and observers is incompatible with Rancière’s fundamentally participatory idea of politics. Neither can he accept Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘ethical reductionism of politics’, the critique of which invariably accompanies Rancière’s references to the sublime. His shifting of the political realm from real to symbolical violence intended to free politics from the residual Kantian moralism is justifiable. However, it also needlessly shakes off the sublime. Hence, finally, I argue for an explicit reintegration of the sublime into Rancière’s idea of politics, based on his postulate of equality.

Paragraph, 2020

Jacques Rancière's theory of democracy shares a great deal with Derrida's. Both view democracy as founded on paradox, define it as the irruption of alterity and, most notably, explain the disjunction between empirical and ideal democracy without recourse to the traditional opposition of the political and the social. Rancière diverges from Derrida, however, in two decisive ways. First, he argues that alterity can be comprehended within the system of democracy, which, therefore, should not be understood as constitutively suspended in a messianic temporality. Secondly, Rancière retains a theory of ‘the people’ as a political agent, while avoiding the metaphysics of an identitarian construction of class. This essay traces out the steps by which Rancière affirms Derrida's deconstruction of the notion that the social is the origin of the political, but derives from it a descriptive model of political subjectivation and agency that Derrida's approach would seem to foreclose.

The essay is an attempt to reinterpret Ranciere’s theory of politics and democracy contrary to its interpretation as a theory of a contingent, anarchical, and groundless disruption circumscribed by the framework of disagreement and opposition of politics to the police order. The author argues that, while notions of contingency, revolt, and disruption are present in Ranciere’s theory, in light of the complexity of Ranciere’s texts and the theoretical framework of “relationship,” these notions by themselves do not represent the entirety of democratic politics. The premise of the essay is that Ranciere’s theory is one of a process of political transformation. This process, animated by the radical equality as the essence of the community of human beings, carries within itself the unfolding potential to bring about the transformation and reconfiguration of material, sociopolitical, and theoretical-discursive structures of the given order. In the context of Ranciere’s political thought, this larger theoretical picture (beginning with the logic of the disagreement followed by disidentification and subjectification of the subjects of the given sociopolitical regime, culminating in the reconfiguration of the field of experiences circumscribed by such a regime) is what democratic politics is.

2012

This book forms the first critical study of Jacques Rancière's impact and contribution to contemporary theoretical and interdisciplinary studies. It showcases the work of leading scholars in fields such as political theory, history and aesthetic theory; each of whom are uniquely situated to engage with the novelty of Rancière's thinking within their respective fields. Each of the essays provides an investigation into the critical stance Rancière takes towards his contemporaries, concentrating on the versatile application of his thought to diverse fields of study (including, political and education theory, cinema studies, literary and aesthetic theory, and historical studies). The aim of this collection is to use the critical interventions Rancière's writing makes on current topics and themes as a way of offering new critical perspectives on his thought. Wielding their individual expertise, each contributor assesses his perspectives and positions on thinkers and topics of contemporary importance. The edition includes a new essay by Jacques Rancière, which charts the different problems and motivations that have shaped his work.