Occupying Space: The Battle for Politics

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

For more than a decade, the construction of politics has been determined within the logic of exception and sovereignty. Although at the end of the twentieth century the Balkan conflict already heralded a logic of war, following September 11th, the early 2000s were marked by terror, creating a foundation where, following the proposals of Carl Schmitt, the specific difference from which to determine the political was to be found once more in the figure of the enemy.

Dis/placing political illiteracy: the politics of intellectual equality in a South African shack-dwellers’ movement

Anna Selmeczi, Interface

This paper starts out with the claim that the contemporary spatio-political  order of the South African “world class” city is conditional upon constructing  many lives as superfluous and disposable. This construction partly rests on the  inherited topography of apartheid displacement which continues to push the  poor black majority into zones of invisibility and inaudibility. Beyond this  physical distancing, the production and abandonment of surplus people also  depends on rendering them as improper political subjects. In the prevailing  political discourse, poor people’s struggles are deemed less than political  through notions such as the idea that all protest is related to the pace of  “service delivery” or accusations of violence, as well as often explicit characterizations of dissenting people as ignorant.

Jacques Rancière: Biopolitics or Politics?

Jacques Ranciere: Biopolitics or Politics? by TigersEye99

“We Are Poor, Not Stupid”: Learning From Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa - Anne Harley

“WE ARE POOR, NOT STUPID”: LEARNING FROM AUTONOMOUS GRASSROOTS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA by TigersEye99

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Jacques Rancière

Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today. Verso

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.

Jacques Rancière on the 'evil third party'

Why has the philosophy of the intelligentsia or activists always needed to blame some evil third party (petty bourgeoisie, ideologist or master thinker) for the shadows and obscurities that get in the way of the harmonious relationship between their own self-consciousness and the self-identity of their popular objects of study? Was this evil party contrived to spirit away another more fearsome threat: that of seeing the thinkers of the night invade the territory of philosophy? 

- Jacques Rancière, Introduction to Proletarian Nights 

Abahlali’s Vocal Politics of Proximity: Speaking, Suffering and Political Subjectivization

by Anna Selmeczi, October 2012

Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.

Communists without communism?

by Jacques Rancière, 2010

Firstly communism is not an ideal. It is an actual form of life. While democracy means freedom and equality only represented in the separate form of law and state, communism is their sensory reality, embedded in the forms of an existing common world.

From the Cult of the People to the Cult of Rancière

A radical social historian as well as philosopher, Jacques Rancière has spent many years rescuing vivid fragments of proletarian life and thought from the  vested interests that claim to speak for them. But in thwarting the instrumentality of intellectuals, he also risks obscuring the material he cherishes and the energies it carries – write Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts in Mute Magazine

“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment

“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment
PhD Thesis by Anna Selmeczi, April 2012

Starting from the observation that today the urban emerges as the main site for the production and abandonment of surplus life – a life whose capacities cannot be rendered useful and is therefore not to be fostered – in this thesis I offer a re-politicized reading of abandonment by drawing on my field-research with the largest South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Grounding this re-politicized reading in the problem of excess freedom that emerges on the horizon of governmental rationality between the political inclusion of the surplus population and their obstructive uselessness, I begin the inquiry by asking how the current order of neoliberal urbanism contains the surplus population when the establishment of the educative trusteeship of development is no longer pertinent.

Politics and aesthetics an interview with Jacques Rancière

Interviewed by Peter Hallward, 2003

For me, democracy isn’t a form of power but the very existence of the political (in so far as politics is distinct from knowing who has the right to occupy power or how power should be occupied), precisely because it defines a paradoxical power – one that doesn’t allow anyone legitimately to claim a place on the basis of his or her competences. Democracy is, first of all, a practice, which means that the very same institutions of power may or may not be accompanied by a democratic life. The same forms of parliamentary powers, the same institutional frameworks can either give rise to a democratic life, that is, a subjectivation of the gap between two ways of counting or accounting for the community, or operate simply as instruments for the reproduction of an oligarchic power.

Democracy, Republic, Representation

by Jacques  Rancière, 2006

The democratic scandal consists simply in revealing this: there will never be, under the name of politics, a single principle of community that legitimates the actions of those who govern on the basis of laws inherent in the coming together of human communities. Rousseau was right to denounce the vicious circle of Hobbes, who claimed to prove the natural unsociability of men on the basis of court intrigues and the backbiting of the
salons. But in describing nature according to the model of society, Hobbes also showed that it is vain to look for the origin of political community in some innate virtue of sociability. If the search for origins freely mixes before and after, it is because it always comes after the fact. The philosophy that looks for the principle of good government or the reasons for which men give themselves governments comes after democracy, which
itself comes after, interrupting the ageless logic according to which communities are governed by those who have the right to exercise their authority over those who are predisposed to be subjected to it.

Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?

by Jacques Rancière, 2004

What lies behind this strange shift from Man to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian? The actual subject of these Rights of Man became Human Rights. Is there not a bias in the statement of such rights? It was obviously impossible to revive the Marxist critique. But another form of suspicion could be revived: the suspicion that the ‘‘man’’ of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights attached to a national community as such.

Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy

Disagreement

“Is there any such thing as political philosophy?” So begins this provocative book by one of the foremost figures in Continental thought. Here, Jacques Rancière brings a new and highly useful set of terms to the vexed debate about political effectiveness and “the end of politics.”

What precisely is at stake in the relationship between “philosophy” and the adjective “political”? In Disagreement, Rancière explores the apparent contradiction between these terms and reveals the uneasy meaning of their union in the phrase “political philosophy”—a juncture related to age-old attempts in philosophy to answer Plato’s devaluing of politics as a “democratic egalitarian” process.

The Philosopher and His Poor

by Jacques Rancière

What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them?

The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

 by Jacques Rancière

The book was published in the early 80s as a contribution to a debate happening in France over education. The debate was over the push by the left to make school a nicer, more welcoming and inclusive place for students. A socialist published a book criticising this arguing that schools should be for education, the issue of how students feel in them is secondary. They are only there to be taught and it is on teaching that people should be focused. Against this Ranciere argued that education does not happen through the transference of knowledge from one subject to another. The teacher is not the holder of knowledge. Rather education is a process of self-education. The learner struggles through problem and through that learns.

Racism: A Passion from Above

by Jacques Rancière, Monthly Review

I'd like to add some reflections on the notion of "state racism" to our meeting's agenda.  These reflections run against a widespread interpretation of measures that our government has recently taken, from the law on the veil to the expulsions of the Roma.  This interpretation detects an opportunism that is exploiting racism and xenophobia for electoral gain.  This supposed critique reinforces the assumption that racism is a popular passion, the frightened and irrational reaction of retrograde layers of the population, who can't adapt to the new mobile and cosmopolitan world.  The state is accused of failing in its duty by showing indifference towards these populations.  But this accusation only reinforces the state's position representing itself as the face of rationality vis-à-vis popular irrationality.

Kristin Ross on Jacques Ranciere

In the spring of 2005 in the village of Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, a group of scholars met for three days to celebrate the work of Jacques Ranciere. In France, a colloquium held in one's honor at Cerisy is acknowledgment of a major contribution to philosophical thought, and among the participants were prominent French philosophers: Alain Badiou was a featured speaker, for instance, while Jean-Luc Nancy contributed an essay to the published proceedings. Yet as the weekend progressed, it was clear that what had brought thinkers from Brazil, England, the United States, Greece, and elsewhere to Cerisy was not the need to bear witness to the replacement of one epistemological theory by another, or to celebrate some other step in the development of a specialized science. Cinema, sociology, literature, politics, and aesthetics were all topics of discussion; Heidegger's name, I believe, was never mentioned. This list of fields gives some idea of the range of thinking Ranciere's work has touched and invigorated, but it does not explain the contingencies and detours that have caused him to become, at different moments, a historian, a critic of social science, a philosopher, or a commentator on cinema, on current politics, or, more recently, on contemporary art practices.

Jacques Ranciere and the Subversion of Mastery

by Peter Hallward

Ranciere's most basic assumption is very simple: everyone thinks, everyone speaks. Like many of his philosophical contemporaries, Ranciere further assumes that thought or discourse always proceeds at odds with itself, through forms of creative disjunction or ambivalence which resist any mechanism designed to pin them down or straighten them out. Thinking evades regulation and contests classification. To think is itself to subvert any rigid distribution of classes, places and norms.

Ten Thesis on Politics

Jacques Rancière, Theory & Event, 2001

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.