Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Theory

2019

Overview of the special issue on Jacques Ranciere and Critical Theory, along with some additional thoughts.

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

While Jacques Rancière has never been affiliated in any way with the Institute for Social Research, this article examines the extent to which his work could be considered “Critical Theory” in the sense most closely associated with the Frankfurt School tradition. I argue that Rancière’s work is not critical theory in this narrow sense; I further lay out a kind of “Rancièrean” criticism of the very project of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. This in turn allows me to sketch out a version of Critical Theory that might survive a Rancièrean critique. Even by this renewed conception, however, I argue that Rancière’s own work still cannot be considered a project of Critical Theory; but I finish the essay by laying out what a possible “Rancièrean” Critical Theory might look like, and why I think such a project would be valuable.

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.

2021

I try to problematise the categories that structure diagnoses of our present and debates about it." (Jacques Rancière 2008c) Introduction-Biography and Placement in the Socio-Political Context 1 Jacques Rancière provokes-also and especially sociology. And yet, or perhaps precisely because of this, Rancière has something to say when it comes to illuminating the spectrum of French sociological thought. To what extent Rancière challenges sociology and which theoretical building blocks and motifs of thought he draws upon in doing so is made clear in this article. First of all, some information on Rancière's biography and the socio-political context as well as the intellectual milieu from which he comes: Born in Algiers in 1940, the philosopher and art theorist studied in Paris at the prestigious university École Normale Supérieure (ENS). From 1968 until 2000, he was a professor and teacher in the Department of Art and Philosophy at the Université Paris VIII Vincennes à Saint Denis. There, Rancière met numerous comradesin-arms, intellectual competitors and colleagues, such as Alain Badiou, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, who, in the wake of May '68, campaigned for a different university based on egalitarian structures and participation (cf. Gilcher-Holtey 2001). After his retirement, Rancière has repeatedly received numerous visiting professorships in many countries, not least in the USA and South America (cf. Klass 2013). Rancière's work, which often combines literarypoetic modes of presentation with a more rigorous scientific style, is generally regarded as difficult, which links him to the other "master thinkers" of 2 his generation. In the early 1960s, Rancière began to intervene in intellectual-political debates in France in the environment of Louis Althusser and his attempt at a structuralist reformulation of (post-)Marxism (Althusser 2011 (1965), Althusser et al. 2015). The disputes thereby conducted between theoretical ideas and their translation into social practice reached a certain climax in May '68 (cf. Dosse 1999: 135-233). After intensive Marx reading and a period of "Althusserianism" (Rancière 2014b)-Rancière was particularly fascinated by Althusser's attempt to understand Marxism as a totality of thought-Rancière soon distanced himself again from his former 'teacher' Althusser. 3 Influenced by these political-theoretical experiences of false claims to representation and supposed theoretical superiority, Rancière spent a great deal of time until the early 1980s in the workers' archives in Paris, tracking down and sifting through documents (of very different kinds) produced by workers. In addition, until 1985 Rancière was active in the journal collective Les Révoltes logiques, which he founded in 1975 (cf. Suter 2011). After this intensive period in 1 I refer in my remarks primarily to an earlier version in: Wetzel, Claviez 2016. Important information on biography and social context is also provided by Davis 2014, Tanke 2011, May 2010 and Dosse 1999. 2 The 'master thinkers' is a negative attribution that goes back to the book The Master Thinkers by André Glucksmann (Glucksmann 1987). I do not subscribe to this interpretation, but use the term with its implicit ambivalence. 3 Rancière justifies this with the fact that Althusser presumptuously and with an authoritarian gesture placed himself at the head of the Marxist movement in the universities (cf. Althusser 1977, 1993; Rancière 1975).

Given the recent proliferation of English-language commentary on the thought of Jacques Rancière, it is appropriate that the title of this recent collection pairs the philosopher"s name with the "contemporary scene." That there has been so much written about Rancière over the past few years necessitates a "lay of the land," and in their selections for this volume Deranty and Ross offer such a view. As the subtitle suggests, the editors use their introductory chapter to position the collection around the performative nature of equality in Rancière"s work:

Arete Politik Felsefe Dergisi, 2021

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.

PhaenEx, 2013

Given the recent proliferation of English-language commentary on the thought of Jacques Rancière, it is appropriate that the title of this recent collection pairs the philosopher"s name with the "contemporary scene." That there has been so much written about Rancière over the past few years necessitates a "lay of the land," and in their selections for this volume Deranty and Ross offer such a view. As the subtitle suggests, the editors use their introductory chapter to position the collection around the performative nature of equality in Rancière"s work:

City Political Papers, 2012

The title of the class -The City and the Political -was coined over a cup of coffee with the vision to explore the gap between thought and action, embodied here by the philosopher and the architect. The gap between the "city" and the "political" is a blind spot, which makes any integrative genealogy controversial and presumptuous, if not rash. We sought to create a space and community to debate this distance at The Public School, Berlin.

Final draft version of the presentation to Axel Honneth – Jacques Rancière. Recognition versus Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016).