Thesis 1:
Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be
defined on its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific
kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the
political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political
subject(ivity) [le sujet politique] not the other way around.
To identify politics with the exercise of, and struggle to
possess, power is to do away with politics. But we also reduce the scope of
politics as a mode of thinking if we conceive of it merely as a theory of power
or as an investigation into the grounds of its legitimacy. If there is
something specific about politics that makes it something other than a more
capacious mode of grouping or a form of power characterized by its mode of
legitimation, it is that it involves a distinctive kind of subject considered,
and it involves this subject in the form of a mode of relation that is its own.
This is what Aristotle means when, in Book I of the Politics, he distinguishes
between political rule (as the ruling of equals) from all other kinds of rule;
or when, in Book III, he defines the citizen as 'he who partakes in the fact of
ruling and the fact of being ruled.' Everything about politics is contained in
this specific relationship, this 'part-taking' [avoir-part],[3] which should be
interrogated as to its meaning and as to its conditions of possibility.
An interrogation into what is 'proper' to politics must be
carefully distinguished from current and widespread propositions regarding
"the return of the political." In the past several years, and in the
context of a state-consensus, we have seen the blossoming of affirmations
proclaiming the end of the illusion of the social and a return to a 'pure' form
of politics. Read through either an Arendtian or Straussian lens, these
affirmations focus on the same Aristotelian texts gestured to above. These
readings generally identify the "proper" political order with that of
the eu zen (i.e., a conception of the good) as opposed to a zen (conceived as
an order of mere living). On this basis, the frontier between the domestic and
the political becomes the frontier between the social and the political; and to
the idea of a city-state defined by its common good is opposed the sad reality
of modern democracy as the rule of the masses and of necessity. In practice,
this celebration of pure politics entrusts the virtue of the 'political good'
to governmental oligarchies enlightened by "experts;" which is to say
that the supposed purification of the political, freed from domestic and social
necessity, comes down to nothing more (or less) than the reduction of the
political to the state [l'étatique].
Behind the current buffooneries of the 'returns' of the
political (that include 'the return of political philosophy'), it is important
to recognize the vicious circle that characterizes political philosophy; a
vicious circle located in the link between the political relationship and the
political subject. This vicious circle posits a way of life that is 'proper' to
politics. The political relationship is subsequently deduced from the
properties of this specific order of being and is explained in terms of the
existence of a character who possesses a good or a specific universality, as
opposed to the private or domestic world of needs or interests. In short,
politics is explained as the accomplishment of a way of life that is proper to
those who are destined for it. This partition -- which is actually the object
of politics -- is posited as its basis.
What is proper to politics is thus lost at the outset if
politics is thought of as a specific way of living. Politics cannot be defined
on the basis of any pre-existing subject. The political 'difference' that makes
it possible to think its subject must be sought in the form of its relation. If
we return to the Aristotelian definition, there is a name given to the subject
(politès) that is defined by a part-taking (metexis) in a form of action
(archein -- ruling) and in the undergoing that corresponds to this doing
(archesthai -- being ruled). If there is something 'proper' to politics, it
consists entirely in this relationship which is not a relationship between
subjects, but one between two contradictory terms through which a subject is
defined. Politics disappears the moment you undo this knot of a subject and a
relation. This is what happens in all fictions, be they speculative or
empiricist, that seek the origin of the political relationship in the
properties of its subjects and in the conditions of their coming together. The
traditional question "For what reasons do human beings gather into
political communities?" is always already a response, and one that causes
the disappearance of the object it claims to explain or to ground -- i.e., the
form of a political part-taking that then disappears in the play of elements or
atoms of sociability.
Thesis 2:
That is proper to politics is the existence of a subject
defined by its participation in contrarieties. Politics is a paradoxical form
of action.
The formulations according to which politics is the ruling
of equals, and the citizen is the one who part-takes in ruling and being ruled,
articulate a paradox that must be thought through rigorously. It is important
to set aside banal representations of the doxa of parliamentary systems that
invoke the reciprocity of rights and duties in order to understand what is
extraordinary in the Aristotelian articulation. This formulation speaks to us
of a being who is at once the agent of an action and the one upon whom the
action is exercised.[4] It contradicts the conventional 'cause-and-effect'
model of action that has it that an agent endowed with a specific capacity
produces an effect upon an object that is, in turn, characterized by its
aptitude for receiving that effect.
This problem is in no way resolved by reverting to the
classic opposition between two modes of action: poiesis, on the one hand,
governed by the model of fabrication that gives form to matter; and praxis, on
the other, which excludes from this relation the 'inter-being'
[l'inter-être][5] of people devoted to politics. As we know, this opposition --
replacing that of zen and eu zen -- sustains a conception of political purity.
In Hannah Arendt's work, for instance, the order of praxis is that of equals with
the power of archein, conceived of as the power to begin anew: "To act, in
its most general sense," she explains in The Human Condition, "means
to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, 'to begin,' 'to
lead,' and eventually 'to rule' indicates);" she concludes this thought by
subsequently linking archein to "the principle of freedom."[6] Once
Arendt defines both a proper mode and sphere of action, a vertiginous short-cut
is formed that allows one to posit a series of equations between 'beginning,'
'ruling,' 'being free,' and living in a city-state ('To be free and to live in
a polis is the same thing' as the same text puts it).
This series of equations finds its equivalent in the
movement that engenders civic equality from the community of Homeric heroes;
equals, that is, in their participation in the power of arche. The first
witness against this Homeric idyllic, however, is Homer himself. Against the
garrulous Thersites -- the man who is an able public speaker despite the fact
that he is not qualified to speak -- Odysseus recalls the fact that the Greek
army has one and only one chief: Agamemnon. He reminds us of what archein
means: to walk at the head. And, if there is one who walks at the head, the
others must necessarily walk behind. The line between the power of archein
(i.e., the power to rule), freedom, and the polis, is not straight but severed.
In order to convince oneself of this, it is enough to see the manner in which
Aristotle characterizes the three possible classes of rule within a polis, each
one possessing a particular title: 'virtue' for the aristoi, 'wealth' for the
oligoi, and 'freedom' for the demos. In this division, 'freedom' appears as the
paradoxical part of the demos about whom the Homeric hero tells us (in no uncertain
terms) that it had only one thing to do: to keep quiet and bow down.
In short, the opposition between praxis and poiesis in no
way resolves the paradoxical definition of the politès. As far as arche is
concerned, as with everything else, the conventional logic has it that there is
a particular disposition to act that is exercised upon a particular disposition
to 'be acted upon.' Thus the logic of arche presupposes a determinate
superiority exercised upon an equally determinate inferiority. In order for
there to be a political subject(ivity), and thus for there to be politics,
there must be a rupture in this logic.
Thesis 3:
Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It
does not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of
positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. It
also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to
such classifications.
In Book III of the Laws, Plato devotes himself to a
systematic inventory of the qualifications (axiomata) for ruling, along with
certain correlative qualifications for being ruled. Out of the seven he retains,
four are traditional qualifications of
authority based on a natural difference; that is, the difference in birth.
Those qualified to rule are those 'born before' or 'born otherwise.' This
grounds the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over
slaves, and nobles over serfs. The fifth qualification is introduced as the principal
principle that summarizes all natural differences: It is the power of those
with a superior nature, of the stronger over the weak -- a power that has the
unfortunate quality, discussed at length in the Gorgias, of being
indeterminate. The sixth qualification, then, gives the only difference that
counts for Plato; namely, the power of those who know [savoir] over those who
do not. There are thus four couplings of traditional qualifications to be had,
along with two theoretical couplings that claim priority over them: namely,
'natural' superiority and the rule of 'science' qua knowledge.
The list ought to stop there. But there is a seventh
qualification: 'the choice of god,' otherwise referring to a drawing of lots
[le tirage au sort] that designates the one who exercises arche. Plato does not
expand upon this. But clearly, this kind of 'choice' points ironically to the
designation by god of a regime previously referred to as one only god could
save: namely, democracy. What thus characterizes a democracy is pure chance or
the complete absence of qualifications for governing. Democracy is that state
of exception where no oppositions can function, where there is no
pre-determined principle of role allocation. 'To partake in ruling and being
ruled' is quite a different matter from reciprocity. It is, in short, an
absence of reciprocity that constitutes the exceptional essence of this
relationship; and this absence of reciprocity rests on the paradox of a
qualification that is absence of qualification. Democracy is the specific
situation in which there is an absence of qualifications that, in turn, becomes
the qualification for the exercise of a democratic arche. What is destroyed in
this logic is the particular quality of arche, its redoubling, which means that
it always precedes itself within a circle of its own disposition and its own
exercise. But this exceptional state is identical with the very condition for
the specificity of politics more generally.
Thesis 4:
Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a
rupture in the logic of arche -- that is, in the anticipation of rule in the
disposition for it -- democracy is the regime of politics in the form of a
relationship defining a specific subject.
What makes possible the metexis proper to politics is the
rupture of all those logics of allocation exercised in the part-taking of
arche. The 'freedom' of a people that constitutes the axiom of democracy has as
its real content the rupture of the axioms of domination: a rupture, that is,
in the correlation between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled.
The citizen who partakes 'in ruling and being ruled' is only thinkable on the
basis of the demos as a figure that ruptures the correspondence between a
series of correlated capacities. Democracy is thus precisely not a political
regime in the sense of a particular constitution that determines different ways
of assembling people under a common authority. Democracy is the institution of
politics -- the institution of both its subject and its mode of relating.
As we know, democracy is a term invented by its opponents,
by all those who were 'qualified' to govern because of seniority, birth,
wealth, virtue, and knowledge [savoir]. Using it as a term of derision, they
articulated an unprecedented reversal of the order of things: the 'power of the
demos' means that those who rule are those who have no specificity in common,
apart from their having no qualification for governing. Before being the name
of a community, demos is the name of a part of the community: namely, the poor.
The 'poor,' however, does not designate an economically disadvantaged part of
the population; it simply designates the category of peoples who do not count,
those who have no qualifications to part-take in arche, no qualification for
being taken into account.
This is exactly what Homer describes in the Thersites
episode evoked above. Those who want to speak, though they belong to the demos,
though they belong to the undifferentiated collection of the 'unaccounted for'
[l'hors-compte] (anarithmoi), get stabbed in the back by Odysseus' scepter.
This is not a deduction but a definition: The one who is 'unaccounted-for,' the
one who has no speech to be heard, is the one of the demos. A remarkable
passage from Book XII of the Odyssey illustrates this point: Polydamas complains
because his opinion has been disregarded by Hector. With you, he says, 'one
never has the right to speak if one belongs to the demos.' Now Polydamas is not
a villain like Thersites; he is Hector's brother. Demos thus does not designate
a socially inferior category: The one who speaks when s/he is not to speak, the
one who part-takes in what s/he has no part in -- that person belongs to the
demos.
Thesis 5:
The 'people' that is the subject of democracy -- and thus
the principal subject of politics -- is not the collection of members in a
community, or the laboring classes of the population. It is the supplementary
part, in relation to any counting of parts of the population that makes it
possible to identify 'the part of those who have no-part' [le compte des
incomptés][7] with the whole of the community.
The people (demos) exists only as a rupture of the logic of
arche, a rupture of the logic of beginning/ruling [commencement/commandement].
It should not be identified either with the race of those who recognize each
other as having the same origin, the same birth, or with a part of a population
or even the sum of its parts. 'People' [peuple] refers to the supplement that
disconnects the population from itself, by suspending the various logics of
legitimate domination. This disjunction is illustrated particularly well in the
crucial reforms that give Athenian democracy its proper status; namely, those
reforms enacted by Cleisthenes when he rearranged the distribution of the demes
[8] over the territory of the city. In constituting each tribe by the addition
of three separate boundaries -- one from the city, one from the coast, and one
from the countryside -- Cleisthenes broke with the ancient principle that kept
the tribes under the rule of local aristocratic chieftainships whose power,
legitimated through legendary birth, had as its real content the economic power
of the landowners. In short, the 'people' is an artifice set at an angle from
the logic that gives the principle of wealth as heir to the principle of birth.
It is an abstract supplement in relation to any actual (ac)count of the parts
of the population, of their qualifications for part-taking in the community,
and of the common shares due to them according to these qualifications. The
'people' is the supplement that inscribes 'the count of the unaccounted-for' or
'the part of those who have no part.'
These expressions should not be understood in their more
populist sense but rather in a structural sense. It is not the laboring and
suffering populace that comes to occupy the terrain of political action and to
identify its name with that of the community. What is identified by democracy
with the role of the community is an empty, supplementary, part that separates
the community from the sum of the parts of the social body. This separation, in
turn, grounds politics in the action of supplementary subjects that are a
surplus in relation to any (ac)count of the parts of society. The whole
question of politics thus lies in the interpretation of this void. The
criticisms that sought to discredit democracy brought the 'nothing' which
constitutes the political people back to the overflow of the ignorant masses
and the greedy populace. The interpretation of democracy posed by Claude Lefort
gave the democratic void its structural meaning.[9] But the theory of the
structural void can be interpreted in two distinct ways: First, the structural
void refers to an-archy, to the absence of an entitlement to rule that
constitutes the very nature of the political space; Secondly, the void is
caused by the 'dis-incorporation' of the king's two bodies -- the human and
divine body.[10] Democracy, according to this latter view, begins with the
murder of the king; in other words, with a collapse of the symbolic thereby producing
a dis-incorporated social presence. And this originary link is posed as the
equivalent of an original temptation to imaginatively reconstruct the 'glorious
body of the people' that is heir to the immortal body of the king and the basis
of every totalitarianism.
Against these interpretations, let us say that the two-fold
body of the people is not a modern consequence of the sacrifice of the
sovereign body but rather a given constitutive of politics. It is initially the
people, and not the king, that has a double body and this duality is nothing
other than the supplement through which politics exists: a supplement to all
social (ac)counts and an exception to all logics of domination.
The seventh qualification, Plato says, is 'god's part.' We
will maintain that this part belonging to god -- this qualification of those
who have no qualification -- contains within it all that is theological in
politics. The contemporary emphasis on the theme of the 'theologico-political'
dissolves the question of politics into that of power and of the grounding
event that is its fundament. It re-doubles
the liberal fiction of the contract with the representation of an original
sacrifice. But the division of arche that conjoins politics and democracy is
not a founding sacrifice: It is, rather, a neutralization of any founding
sacrifice. This neutralization could find its exact fable at the end of Oedipus
at Colonus: it is at the price of the disappearance of the sacrificial body, at
the price of not seeking Oedipus' body, that Athenian democracy receives the
benefit of its burial. To want to disinter the body is not only to associate
the democratic form with a scenario of sin or of original malediction. More
radically, it is to return the logic of politics to the question of an
originary scene of power; in other words, to return politics to the state. By
interpreting the empty part in terms of psychosis, the dramaturgy of original
symbolic catastrophe transforms the political exception into a sacrificial
symptom of democracy: It subsumes the litigiousness proper to politics under
any of the innumerable versions of an originary 'crime' or 'murder.'
Thesis 6:
If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference, with
the distribution of social parts and shares, then it follows that its existence
is in no way necessary, but that it occurs as a provisional accident in the
history of the forms of domination. It also follows from this that political
litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics.
Politics cannot be deduced from the necessity of gathering
people into communities. It is an exception to the principles according to
which this gathering operates. The 'normal' order of things is that human
communities gather together under the rule of those qualified to rule -- whose
qualifications are legitimated by the very fact that they are ruling. These
governmental qualifications may be summed up according to two central
principles: The first refers society to the order of filiation, both human and
divine. This is the power of birth. The second refers society to the vital
principle of its activities. This is the power of wealth. Thus, the 'normal'
evolution of society comes to us in the progression from a government of birth
to a government of wealth. Politics exists as a deviation from this normal
order of things. It is this anomaly that is expressed in the nature of
political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscription of
'the (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.'
There is politics as long as 'the people' is not identified
with the race or a population, inasmuch as the poor are not equated with a
particular disadvantaged sector, and as long as the proletariat is not a group
of industrial workers, etc… Rather, there is politics inasmuch as 'the people'
refers to subjects inscribed as a supplement to the count of the parts of
society, a specific figure of 'the part of those who have no-part.' Whether
this part exists is the political issue and it is the object of political
litigation. Political struggle is not a conflict between well defined interest
groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the
community in different ways. The clash between the 'rich' and the 'poor,' for
instance, is the struggle over the very possibility of these words being
coupled, of their being able to institute categories for another (ac)counting
of the community. There are two ways of counting the parts of the community: The
first only counts empirical parts -- actual groups defined by differences in
birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the
social body. The second counts 'in addition' a part of the no-part. We will
call the first police and the second politics.
Thesis 7:
Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police
is a 'partition of the sensible' [le partage du sensible] whose principle is
the absence of a void and of a supplement.
The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police is neither repression nor even control over the living. Its essence is a certain manner of partitioning the sensible. We will call 'partition of the sensible' a general law that defines the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of 'world;' it is the nemeïn upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows participation (see Editor's note 2). A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared 'common' [un commun partagé] and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This latter form of distribution, in turn, itself presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible.
The essence of the police is to be a partition of the sensible characterized by the absence of a void or a supplement: society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of action, in places where these occupations are exercised, in modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. In this fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place for a void. It is this exclusion of what 'there is not' that is the police-principle at the heart of statist practices. The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.
The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police is neither repression nor even control over the living. Its essence is a certain manner of partitioning the sensible. We will call 'partition of the sensible' a general law that defines the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of 'world;' it is the nemeïn upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows participation (see Editor's note 2). A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared 'common' [un commun partagé] and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This latter form of distribution, in turn, itself presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible.
The essence of the police is to be a partition of the sensible characterized by the absence of a void or a supplement: society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of action, in places where these occupations are exercised, in modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. In this fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place for a void. It is this exclusion of what 'there is not' that is the police-principle at the heart of statist practices. The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.
Thesis 8:
The principal function of politics is the configuration of
its proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its
operations. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the
presence of two worlds in one.[11]
Let us begin from an empirical given: police intervention in
public spaces does not consist primarily in the interpellation of
demonstrators, but in the breaking up of demonstrations. The police is not that
law interpellating individuals (as in Althusser's "Hey, you there!")
unless one confuses it with religious subjectification.[12] It is, first of
all, a reminder of the obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there
isn't: "Move along! There is nothing to see here!" The police says
that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move
along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space
of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of
'moving-along' into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people,
the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there
is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein. It is the established
litigation of the perceptible, on the nemeïn that founds any communal nomos.
This partition constituting politics is never given in the
form of a lot, of a kind of property that obliges or compels politics. These
properties are litigious as much in their understanding as in their extension.
Exemplary in this regard are those properties that, for Aristotle, define a political
ability or are intended for 'the good life.' Apparently nothing could be
clearer than the distinction made by Aristotle in Book I of the Politics: the
sign of the political nature of humans is constituted by their possession of
the logos, the articulate language appropriate for manifesting a community in
the aisthesis of the just and the unjust, as opposed to the animal phone,
appropriate only for expressing the feelings of pleasure and displeasure. If
you are in the presence of an animal possessing the ability of the articulate
language and its power of manifestation, you know you are dealing with a human
and therefore with a political animal. The only practical difficulty is in
knowing which sign is required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be
sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing
an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is
someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not
seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an
utterance coming out of their mouths. And the same goes for the opposition so
readily invoked between the obscurity of domestic and private life, and the
radiant luminosity of the public life of equals. In order to refuse the title
of political subjects to a category -- workers, women, etc… -- it has
traditionally been sufficient to assert that they belong to a 'domestic' space,
to a space separated from public life; one from which only groans or cries
expressing suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches
demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories has
always consisted in re-qualifying these places, in getting them to be seen as
the spaces of a community, of getting themselves to be seen or heard as
speaking subjects (if only in the form of litigation); in short, participants
in a common aisthesis. It has consisted in making what was unseen visible; in
getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech; in demonstrating
to be a feeling of shared 'good' or 'evil' what had appeared merely as an
expression of pleasure or pain.
The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not the
confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a
distance of the sensible from itself. Politics makes visible that which had no
reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another (for instance, the world
where the factory is a public space within the one where it is considered a
private one, the world where workers speak out vis-à-vis the one where their
voices are merely cries expressing pain). This is precisely why politics cannot
be identified with the model of communicative action since this model presupposes
the partners in communicative exchange to be pre-constituted, and that the
discursive forms of exchange imply a speech community whose constraint is
always explicable. In contrast, the particular feature of political dissensus
is that the partners are no more constituted than is the object or the very
scene of discussion. The ones making visible the fact that they belong to a
shared world the other does not see -- cannot take advantage of -- the logic
implicit to a pragmatics of communication. The worker who argues for the public
nature of a 'domestic' matter (such as a salary dispute) must indicate the
world in which his argument counts as an argument and must demonstrate it as
such for those who do not possess a frame of reference to conceive of it as
argument. Political argument is at one and the same time the demonstration of a
possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a
subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is
required to see the object and to hear the argument that he or she 'normally'
has no reason to either see or hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical
world that relates two separate worlds.
Politics thus has no 'proper' place nor does it possess any
'natural' subjects. A demonstration is political not because it takes place in
a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its
form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible. A political
subject is not a group of interests or ideas: It is the operator of a
particular mode of subjectification and litigation through which politics has
its existence. Political demonstrations are thus always of the moment and their
subjects are always provisional. Political difference is always on the shore of
its own disappearance: the people are close to sinking into the sea of the
population or of race, the proletariat borders on being confused with workers
defending their interests, the space of a people's public demonstration is
always at risk of being confused with the merchant's agora, etc.
The deduction of politics from a specific world of equals or
free people, as opposed to another world lived out of necessity, takes as its
ground precisely the object of its litigation. It thus renders compulsory a
blindness to those who 'do not see' and have no place from which to be seen.
Exemplary, in this regard, is a passage from Arendt's On Revolution discussing
the manner in which John Adams identifies the unhappiness of the poor with the fact of 'not being
seen.'[13] Such an identification, she comments, could itself only emanate from
a man belonging to a privileged community of equals. And, by the same token, it
could 'hardly be understood' by the people comprising the relevant categories.
We could express amazement at the extraordinary deafness of this affirmation in
the face of the multiplicity of discourses and demonstrations of the 'poor'
concerning precisely their mode of visibility. But this deafness has nothing
accidental about it. It forms a circle with the acceptance of an original
partition, a founding politics, with what was in fact the permanent object of
litigation constituting politics. It forms a circle with the definition of homo
laborans as a partition of the 'ways of life.' This circle is not that of any
particular theoretician; it is the circle of 'political philosophy.'
Thesis 9:
Inasmuch as what is proper to 'political philosophy' is to
ground political action in a specific mode of being, so is it the case that
'political philosophy' effaces the litigiousness constitutive of politics. It
is in its very description of the world of politics that philosophy effects
this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated through to the
non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world.
That the distinguishing feature of politics is the existence
of a subject who 'rules' by the very fact of having no qualifications to rule;
that the principle of beginnings/ruling is irremediably divided as a result of
this, and that the political community is specifically a litigious community --
this is the 'political secret' that philosophy first encounters. If we can
speak of the privileged stature of the 'Ancients' over the 'Moderns,' it is a
consequence of their having first perceived this 'secret' and not of having
been the first to oppose the community of the 'good' to that of the 'useful.'
At the head of the anodyne expression 'political philosophy' one finds the
violent encounter between philosophy and the exception to the law of arche
proper to politics, along with philosophy's effort to resituate politics under
the auspices of this law. The Gorgias, the Republic, the Politics, the Laws,
all these texts reveal the same effort to efface the paradox or scandal of a
'seventh qualification' -- to make of democracy a simple case of the
indeterminable principle of 'the government of the strongest,' against which
one can only oppose a government of those who know [les savants]. These texts
all reveal a similar strategy of placing the community under a unique law of
partition and expelling the empty part of the demos from the communal body.
But this expulsion does not simply take place in the form of
the opposition between the 'good' regime of the community that is both one and
hierarchised according to its principle of unity, and the 'bad' regimes of
division and disorder. It takes place within the very presupposition that
identifies a political form with a way of life; and this presupposition is
already operating in the procedures for describing 'bad' regimes, and democracy
in particular. All of politics, as we have said, is played out in the
interpretation of democratic 'anarchy.' In identifying it with the dispersal of
the desires of democratic man, Plato transforms the form of politics into a
mode of existence and, further, transforms the void into an overflow. Before
being the theorist of the 'ideal' or 'enclosed' city-state, Plato is the
founder of the anthropological conception of the political, the conception that
identifies politics with the deployment of the properties of a type of man or a
mode of life. This kind of 'man,' this 'way of being,' this form of the
city-state: it is there, before any discourse on the laws or the educational
methods of the ideal state, before even the partition of the classes of the
community, the partition of the perceptible that cancels out political
singularity.
The initial gesture of political philosophy thus has a
two-fold consequence: On the one hand, Plato founds a community that is the
effectuation of a principle of unity, of an undivided principle -- a community
strictly defined as a common body with its places and functions and with its
forms of interiorisation of the common. He founds an archi-politics[14] based
on a law of unity between the 'occupations' of the city-state and its 'ethos,'
(in other words its way of inhabiting an abode), as law but also as the
specific 'tone' according to which this ethos reveals itself. This etho-logy of
the community once again makes politics and police indistinguishable. And
political philosophy, inasmuch as it wants to give to the community a single
foundation, is condemned to have to re-identify politics and police, to cancel
out politics through the gesture that founds it.
But Plato also invents a 'concrete' mode for describing the
production of political forms. In a word, he invents the very forms of the
refusal of the 'ideal state,' the settled forms of opposition between
philosophical 'a-prior-ism' and concrete sociological or political-scientific
analyses of the forms of politics as expressions of ways of life. This second
legacy is more profound and more long-lasting than the first. The sociology of
the political is the second resource -- the deuteron plous -- of political
philosophy that accomplishes (sometimes against itself) its fundamental
project: to found the community on the basis of a univocal partition of the
sensible. In particular, de Tocqueville's analysis of democracy, whose
innumerable variants and ersatz versions feed the discourses on modern democracy,
the age of the masses, the mass individual, etc., fits into the continuity of
the theoretical gesture that cancels out the structural singularity of 'the
qualification without qualifications' and the 'part of the no-part,' by
re-describing democracy as a social phenomenon, of the collective effectuation
of the properties of a type of man.
Inversely, the claims for the purity of the bios politikos
(of the republican constitution and of the community versus the individual or
democratic mass, and the opposition between the political and the social) share
in the effectiveness of the same knot between the a-prior-ism of the
'republican' re-founding, and the sociological description of democracy. No
matter which side one rests on, the opposition between the 'political' and the
'social' is a matter defined entirely within the frame of 'political
philosophy;' in other words, it is a matter that lies at the heart of the
philosophical repression of politics. The current proclamations of a 'return to
politics' and 'political philosophy' are an imitation of the originary gesture
of 'political philosophy,' without actually grasping the principles or issues
involved in it. In this sense, it is the radical forgetting of politics and of
the tense relationship between politics and philosophy. The sociological theme
of the 'end of politics' in post-modern society and the 'politico' theme of the
'return of politics' both derive from the initial double gesture of 'political
philosophy' and both move towards the same forgetting of politics.
Thesis 10:
The 'end of politics' and the 'return of politics' are two
complementary ways of canceling out politics in the simple relationship between
a state of the social and a state of statist apparatuses. 'Consensus' is the
vulgar name given to this cancellation.
The sociological thesis of the 'end of politics'
symmetrically posits the existence of a state of the social such that politics
no longer has a necessary raison-d'être; whether or not it has accomplished its
ends by bringing into being precisely this state (i.e., the exoteric American
Hegelian-Fukayama-ist version) or whether its forms are no longer adapted to
the fluidity and artificiality of present-day economic and social relations
(i.e., the esoteric European Heideggerian-Situationist version). The thesis
thus amounts to asserting that the logical telos of capitalism makes it so that
politics becomes, once again, out dated. And then it concludes with either the
mourning of politics before the triumph of an immaterial Leviathan, or its
transformation into forms that are broken up, segmented, cybernetic, ludic,
etc… -- adapted to those forms of the social that correspond to the highest
stage of capitalism. It thus fails to recognize that in actual fact, politics
has no reason for being in any state of the social and that the contradiction
of the two logics is an unchanging given that defines the contingency and
precariousness proper to politics. Via a Marxist detour, the 'end of politics'
thesis -- along with the consensualist thesis -- grounds politics in a
particular mode of life that identifies the political community with the social
body, subsequently identifying political practice with state practice. The
debate between the philosophers of the 'return of politics' and the
sociologists of the 'end of politics' is thus a straightforward debate
regarding the order in which it is appropriate to take the presuppositions of
'political philosophy' so as to interpret the consensualist practice of
annihilating politics.
Notes
[1] The original translation of the "Ten Theses"
was done by Rachel Bowlby. However, some phrases were modified by Davide
Panagia in consultation with Jacques Rancière. Terms in square brackets are
Rancière's original French expressions.
[2] Our English 'political subject(ivity)' does not give an
adequate sense of Rancière's "le sujet politique," a term that refers
both to the idea of a political subjectivity and to the 'proper' subject of
politics.
[3] Rancière plays on the double meaning of the avoir-part
as both a 'partaking' and a 'partition.'
[4] The reference is to Arendt's claim that "the human
capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems
to entangle its producer to such an extent that he appears much more the victim
and the sufferer than the author and the doer of what he has done" (The
Human Condition, p. 233-234; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[5] The word-play, here, is on the idea of an 'inter-est'
referring both to a principle of inter-relating and to the idea of societal
'interest.' Rancière is invoking an Arendtian distinction found in her The
Human Condition (see pages 50-58).
[6] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 177.
[7] Though the literal translation of the French is
"the count of the unaccounted-for" the formulation found in the
English translation of Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, (Julie Rose
trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) is retained for the
sake of consistency.
[8] Demes were townships or divisions of ancient Attica. In
modern Greece the term refers to communes.
[9] See Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988) especially Part IV: "On the
Irreducible Element."
[10] Rancière is invoking Ernst Kantorowicz's work on
medieval political theology, also present in Lefort's study.
[11] Rancière's conception of dissensus counts as an
instance of the paradox of the 'one and the many' characteristic of democratic
politics.
[12] Rancière here refers to Althusser's "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses" (see Lenin and Philosophy, New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971).
[13] See Arendt's chapter entitled "The Social
Question" from On Revolution; especially pages 68-71 (New York: Penguin
Books, 1990).
[14] See Rancière's Dis-agreement (Chapter 4) for an
extended discussion of this concept.