Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature 9783631881644, 9783631905654, 9783631905661

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Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature Jerzy Franczak comprehensively presents Jacques Rancière’s thought by emphasizing the relationship between politics and literature. This detailed analysis takes into account the context of modern aesthetics and political philosophy, as a result, the book introduces further protagonists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, or JeanFrançois Lyotard. Franczak first reconstructs Rancière’s original philosophy of literature and subsequently apply it in readings of select world literature masterpieces by Gustav Flaubert, Max Jacob, Bertold Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth.

The Author Jerzy Franczak is an accomplished writer and academic, currently serving as a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He has published numerous novels, collections of short stories, essays, and studies on philosophy and literature. His main research areas are contemporary critical thought, the history of the avant-garde, and modernist art.

Jerzy Franczak

Jerzy Franczak

Cross-Roads. Studies in Culture, Liter ary Theory, and History  32

32

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

Cross-Roads. Studies in Culture, Liter ary Theory, and History  32

Jerzy Franczak

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

ISBN 978-3-631-88164-4

CR-H_32-288164_Franczak_ME_A5HCk 152x214 globalL.indd Alle Seiten

10.07.23 18:43

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature Jerzy Franczak comprehensively presents Jacques Rancière’s thought by emphasizing the relationship between politics and literature. This detailed analysis takes into account the context of modern aesthetics and political philosophy, as a result, the book introduces further protagonists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, or JeanFrançois Lyotard. Franczak first reconstructs Rancière’s original philosophy of literature and subsequently apply it in readings of select world literature masterpieces by Gustav Flaubert, Max Jacob, Bertold Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth.

The Author Jerzy Franczak is an accomplished writer and academic, currently serving as a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He has published numerous novels, collections of short stories, essays, and studies on philosophy and literature. His main research areas are contemporary critical thought, the history of the avant-garde, and modernist art.

CR-H_32-288164_Franczak_ME_A5HCk 152x214 globalL.indd Alle Seiten

Jerzy Franczak

Jerzy Franczak

Cross-Roads. Studies in Culture, Liter ary Theory, and History   32

32

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

Cross-Roads. Studies in Culture, Liter ary Theory, and History   32

Jerzy Franczak

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

10.07.23 18:43

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

CrossCross-Roads. Studies in Culture, Literary Theory, and History Edited by Ryszard Nycz

Volume 32

Jerzy Franczak

Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

Translated by Mikołaj Golubiewski and Jan Burzyński

Lausanne - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - New York – Oxford

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. The Publication is funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Poland as a part of the "National Programme for the Development of the Humanities", project number NPRH/U21/SP/496001/2021/10, with a funding amount of 74.628 PLN and a total project value of 74.628 PLN. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Cover image courtesy of Benjamin ben Chaim.

ISSN 2191-6179 ISBN 978-3-631-88164-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-90565-4 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-90566-1 (E-PUB) DOI 10.3726/b21035 © 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne Published by: Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin, Deutschland [email protected] http://www.peterlang.com/ All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

Table of Contents Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... 7 Rancière: Montages .............................................................................................. 9 L’indiscipliné .......................................................................................................... 9 Patricide ..............................................................................................................  12 The Event ............................................................................................................  15 Logic Revolts ......................................................................................................  19 Map of the Possible ............................................................................................  21

I The Aesthetic Revolution .........................................................................  27 Emma’s Crime ....................................................................................................  27 Liberty, Equality, Indifference ..........................................................................  32 Literature, Medicine, Democracy ....................................................................  36 Regimes of Art ...................................................................................................  39 A Positive Contradiction ..................................................................................  43 Mute Word ..........................................................................................................  47 Democratic Form ...............................................................................................  51 False Historicizations ........................................................................................  61 The Aesthetic Unconscious ..............................................................................  67

II Slicing the World .........................................................................................  73 The Beggar of Naples .........................................................................................  73 Sensible ................................................................................................................  77 The Aesthetic State .............................................................................................  82 The Sublime ........................................................................................................  89

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Table of Contents

Police and Politics ............................................................................................  96 White and White ............................................................................................  112 Consensual Times ..........................................................................................  119

III Scandal! ........................................................................................................  137 Annulling Politics ..........................................................................................  137 Counterlives ....................................................................................................  143 À la Recherche du Peuple Perdu ....................................................................  148 Non Sumus, Non Existumus ..........................................................................  160 The Nights of Labor .......................................................................................  174 The Incalculable .............................................................................................  184

IV Vicious Circle ............................................................................................  197 The Platonic Lie ..............................................................................................  197 Parmenidean Marxism ..................................................................................  205 In the Belly of the Beast ................................................................................  223 Poetics of Knowledge ....................................................................................  229 Paradox of the Spectator ...............................................................................  240

V Exercises in Freedom .............................................................................  251 The Ignorant Schoolmaster ..........................................................................  251 Glory To Thieves! ...........................................................................................  264 A Literary Animal ..........................................................................................  272 The Spectacle of the Scaffold ........................................................................  286 Opening ..........................................................................................................  298

Bibliography .......................................................................................................  307 Index ......................................................................................................................  331

Abbreviations Whenever possible, I use English translations of Jacques Rancière’s books, leaving references to the French texts when they are not translated or show significant discrepancies between the original versions and the available translations. Below, I list the abbreviations of Rancière’s works that I use throughout this publication. A AD AL AU CT D DOP EQT ES ETP FI FPA FW HD IS LT MDS ME MOE MP MPS MS MT NL NoH OS PdL

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art Aesthetics and Its Discontents Althusser’s Lesson The Aesthetic Unconscious Chronicles of Consensual Time Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics En quel temps vivons-​nous? Conversation avec Eric Hazan The Emancipated Spectator Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens The Future of the Image “From Politics to Aesthetics?” The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing Hatred of Democracy The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction La méthode de la scène Malaise dans l’esthétique The Method of Equality: Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan Moments politiques: Interventions 1977–​2009 [French edition] Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics Les mots et les torts: Dialogue avec Javier Bassas The Nights of Labor The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge On the Shores of Politics Politique de la litterature

8 PhP POA SP WE

Abbreviations

The Philosopher and His Poor The Politics of Aesthetics Les Scènes du Peuple (Les Révoltes logiques, 1975/​1985) “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed”

Rancière: Montages I write to shatter the boundaries that separate specialists  –​ of philosophy, art, social sciences, etc. I write for those who are also trying to tear down the walls between specialties and competences. –​Jacques Rancière in conversation with Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey1

L’indiscipliné We may consider Jacques Rancière’s oeuvre –​comprising dozens of books, articles, and interviews –​from the perspective of irreducible diversity. Of course, it is difficult to establish an unproblematic bond between commentaries on the writings of nineteenth-​century French revolutionaries, the philosophical tale of Joseph Jacotot, political treatises divided into theses, divagations on the theory of historiography, passionate polemical attacks on contemporary critical thought, ad-​hoc publicist interventions, and systematic interpretations of canonical works of contemporary art and literature. At first glance, we notice the multiplicity of problematic fields, the variability of discursive techniques, the relentless conceptual work, and –​at the metatheoretical level –​the constant examination of the practical effectiveness of the terms and concepts collected in his “toolbox.” Attempts at a comprehensive approach to Rancière’s philosophy usually presuppose making this heterogeneity more familiar. The simplest model is based on temporalization:  by combining a bibliography with a biography projected onto a historical background, one may identify moments of rupture and draw lines of continuity to construct a narrative on the evolution of beliefs and the transformation of the conceptual system. I will make such an attempt in this introductory chapter, which aims to present Rancière and situate his most important works in the epoch’s context. However, I admit that I am more interested in a different kind of profound unity of this work. Every book by Rancière remains an “intervention in a specific context,”2 following the Latin etymology of the word, which means “entry in-​between.” We may understand the intervention

1 F. Carnevale, J. Kelsey, “Art of the Possible (Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière),” Artforum International 45.7/​2007, pp. 256–​261. 2 O.  Davis, Jacques Rancière, Cambridge: Polity 2010, p. x.

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as entering various disputes as a third party, an attempt to reformulate a controversy and shift a conflict. Each of these interventions occurs in a space divided into specific domains governed by their respective competences. First of all, these domains are scientific disciplines, which not only define their method but also their object of research, regulating the relations between the object and the conditions of its comprehensibility. However, there are also other fields, not necessarily connected with the authority of science  –​like political journalism or literary criticism  –​in which there is also a specific discipline defining the relations between being, thought, and words, or an orthology, namely a norm of speaking that supports orthodoxy by defining what one may say or think.3 Rancière emphasizes that all of his conceptual inventions are “paths between different fields that allow to suspend legitimations of power tied to how these fields are circumscribed and to lend the rights of this power to an intelligence without privilege” (MP 154).4 Therefore, changeability and diversity are a function of a single imperative: to escape the rule of discipline, to operate in the space of institutional and discursive indeterminacy. Rancière remains a purposely interdisciplinary or indisciplinary5 philosopher. However, this does not mean he praises methodological anarchism. On the contrary, he tries to establish his method, in which thinking (penser) would always be reconsidering (repenser), and the conceptual elaboration of an object would move it from its usual place of appearance, subjecting it to changes in discursive registers, systems of reference, and temporal coordinates (ETP 182). Rancière follows Deleuze’s maxim that philosophy is based neither on communication nor on contemplation but on discovering concepts, and that it is precisely the creation of concepts. They should have “a necessity, as well as

3 Georges Canguilhem uses the term “orthology” to refer to the regulation of language usage. The establishment of a grammatical norm (in France in the eighteenth century), like the establishment of a metrical, industrial, or hygienic norm, was a normalizing operation (where the language of the educated bourgeoisie served as a prototype) and at the same time a pathologizing one (anything different) that served to define and perpetuate social functions. All grammaticalized scientific discourses are designed for a similar inclusive-​exclusionary effect. G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, New York: Zone Books 1991, pp. 244–​248. 4 Fr. “Les concepts pour moi ne sont pas des idees à la maniére platonicienne, mais des chemins tracés entre. Des domaines différents qui permettent de suspendre les légitimations de pouvoir liées à la circonscription des domaines et de rendre ses droits à une intelligence sans privilèges.” 5 “Editorial,” Labyrinthe 17/​2004, pp.  6–​7

L’indiscipliné

11

an unfamiliarity,” that distinguishes thought from ordinary opinion and gives it its revolutionary character.6 We see the genesis of Rancière’s indisciplinarity in the historical circumstances which influenced his intellectual formation (Althusser’s school, May 68). I will occasionally reach for such explanations, but my ambition remains to present Rancière’s aesthetic and political theory as a whole, which gains coherence based on a “dialectical montage.” We may characterize its specificity as follows: The dialectical way invests chaotic power in the creation of little machineries of the heterogenous. By fragmenting continuums and distancing terms that call for each other, or, conversely, by assimilating heterogenous elements and combining incompatible things, it creates clashes. And it makes the clashes thus developed small measuring tools, conducive to revealing a disruptive power of community, which itself establishes another term of measurement (FI 56).

Rancière willingly uses the effects of montage, in both of the models presented –​tearing apart conceptual adhesions, distancing or displacing the elements of the opposition, and linking together what we spontaneously treat as different. This is evident on all levels, from proof techniques and the famous “arguments from juxtaposition” –​most spectacular in The Philosopher and His Poor –​to the non-​obvious yet undeniable connectivity of subsequent works. The specific “unity in multiplicity” of Rancière’s legacy is determined by the constant setting in motion of two procedures: the problematization of authority (of a philosopher, intellectual, pedagogue) and the pursuit of the rights of “unprivileged intellect” recognized neither by conservative supporters of traditional hierarchies nor by progressive defenders of the disinherited. Rancière examines systems of voice distribution that always involve some form of exclusion and seeks a position that would allow for the development of critical reflection beyond the principle of authority and the relations of domination. Therefore, Rancière rejects the tradition of suspicious thought, which has developed numerous techniques of subversion, namely of turning reality into an illusion or vice versa. “Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established” (POA 49). All symptomatology reinforces the philosopher’s power and nullifies any emancipatory promise, even if the latter is declared expressis verbis. It causes social and artistic phenomena to be treated in terms of camouflage, thus establishing a division between those who can see through the game of appearances and those who succumb to it. 6 G. Deleuze, “On Philosophy,” in: Negotiations: 1972–​1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press 1995 p. 136.

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Rancière: Montages

How to deconstruct the logic of mastery/​mastership (maître/​maîtrise) that is maintained by demystification? Rancière replies: one must weaken the vertical relationship (surface/​depth) and refine thinking in terms of horizontal distributions (POA 465). One must reject the dialectics of truth and semblance and focus on analyzing the distribution of the sensible. One must discover how the sensible configures itself in encounters of police and politics.

Patricide In 1961, twenty-​one-​year-​old Jacques Rancière enrolled in Louis Althusser’s seminar. Four years later, Rancière was listed as co-​author (with Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, and Pierre Macherey) of Reading Capital, the most famous attempt to reformulate Marxist political theory in the spirit of structuralism. The year 1974 saw the publication of Rancière’s La Leçon d’Althusser, a frontal critique of the master’s formalist method, doctrinairism, and anointed priesthood. Thus, we may perceive the 1960s as a period of “struggle against the influence,” liberation from intellectual dependence culminating in an act of ritual patricide.7 How was Althusser attractive to a whole generation of leftist intellectuals? First, his rigorous method brought the promise of a break with the humanist and Sartrean interpretation of Marx. Following the spirit of the times, Althusser’s method transformed Marxism into a theory of form8 under the banner of neo-​scientism. Second, this maneuver gave hope to regain Marx. It was all about returning to the source and establishing the foundation for a new political battle. By the 1960s, it had become clear that the Soviet Union was a repressive police state. Khrushchev’s denunciation of the ideological and political errors of the “cult of personality” period could not be accepted in good faith as a declaration of a new beginning. After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union  –​and recent events such as the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the Algier War in 1954–​1962, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Vietnam War developments of 1965, and the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 –​all those who believed in the revolutionary potential of communism had

7 Y. Duroux, “La Querelle interminable,” in: La Philosophie déplacée. Autour de Jacques Rancière, eds. L. Cornu, P. Vermeren, Paris: Horlieu 2006, p. 21. 8 Alain Badiou proves that in the early 1960s both Marxism (Althusser) and psychoanalysis (Lacan) turned into theories of form, respectively: into a theory of modes of production, which is a form of History, and into a theory of the psychic apparatus, which is a form of Subject. A. Badiou, “Savoir et pouvoir après la tempête,” in: L’Aventure de la philosophie française depuis les années 1960, Paris: La fabrique 2012, p. 233.

Patricide

13

to face a double crisis of legitimation. First, it had to be made clear that the deviating superstructure corresponded to a “correct base.”9 Second, there was a need to return to Marx’s writings to find explanations for these aberrations and salvage the emancipatory potential of materialist dialectics.10 Althusser’s ambition was “to think Marx in his historical context to allow us to implement Marxism in ours” (AL 111). Rancière’s analysis in Reading Capital is orthodoxly Althusserian in its character. It begins with a diagnosis of an epistemological break in Marx work that separates the early, humanistic stage from the subsequent, scientific one,11 and then develops an analysis of commodity fetishism. Rancière demonstrates that there is no such thing as the real value of the commodity, inherent in the object and abstracted from the context of social production, since all value is inscribed in the economic and social structure, and as such remains a “metonimical manifestation of structure.”12 Finally, Rancière postulates that the usual fetishistic perception, which reduces the complex whole to the feature of an object, should be contrasted with a strictly scientistic method of studying social and economic phenomena. Published a decade later, Althusser’s Lesson targets the method’s scientistic profile. The explicit goal of Althusserianism was to free Marxism from the authority of the Communist Party, while the implicit goal (which does not mean it was assumed in bad faith but simply implied by a particular conceptual game) was to reassure intellectuals of their crucial role in history seen as an emancipatory process. For Rancière, Althusserianism remained the model “discourse of order” (AL 113), all the more dangerous for its use of subversive vocabulary. Graduating from the school of formalist thinking was Rancière’s basic formative experience. One could say that Rancière abandoned his maître savant and headed out in search of the maître ignorant, only to find him in the emblematic figures of Jacotot or Gauny. However, despite repeated gestures of negation, Althusser’s legacy became a permanent part of Rancière’s work. Its presence 9 It is about maintaining beliefs that “the socialist base supports a superstructure that is not socialist.” See V. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-​Fox, J. M. Harding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980, p. 129. 10 J. Rancière, “Althusser,” in: A Companion to Continental Philosophy, eds. S. Critchley, W. Schroeder, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1998, p. 530. 11 L.  Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, London: Allen Lane 1969, pp. 51–​55 and 262–​266. 12 J. Rancière, “Le Concept de critique et la critique de l’économie politique des “Manuscrits de 1844” au “Capital”,” in: L. Althusser, Lire le Capital, Paris 1965, p. 123.

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could be narrowed down to four points: (1) opposition to Marxism as a technique of economic reductionism, the tendency to marginalize market factors and focus on the contradictions of the superstructure, in other words, the conviction that the economic dialectic never occurs in a pure state and “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes;”13 (2) paradoxical promise of “theoretical practice,” the concept of philosophizing as an engagement in battle; (3) indisciplinarity understood as attempts to “displace philosophy;” (4) the declarative style of philosophizing, consisting in “presenting theses.”14 The consequences of radical opposition and above all the rejection of the thesis that historical illusions require philosophical intervention seem equally important (AL 23). Young Rancière grew in opposition to the insistent maintenance of the leading role of intellectuals and the denial of all value to labor thought: Without the efforts of intellectual workers there could be no theoretical tradition (in history or philosophy) in the workers’ movement … on the one hand, the “spontaneous” ideology of the workers, if left to itself, could only produce utopian socialism, trade-​ unionism, anarchism and anarcho-​syndicalism; on the other hand, Marxist socialism, presupposing as it does the massive theoretical labor of the establishment and development of a science and a philosophy without precedent, could only be the work of men with a thorough historical, scientific and philosophical formation, intellectuals of very high quality.15

In an initial impulse of defiance, Rancière turned away from political theory and dived into the archives of the labor movement. He decided to search for original thought in the pamphlets and proclamations, diaries, and private correspondence of revolted proletarians. Thus, Rancière not only dodged the blackmail of scientificity established by Althusser but also defused the simplistic dichotomy already present in Marx’s writings:  on the one hand, the idealized vision of the proletariat and, on the other hand, the caricatured image of contemporary workers’ activists. Rancière shiftes his focus to the question of individual subjectivity, metaphorically illustrated by the very title of the book that resulted from this search –​La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-​Century France; 1981) –​which focuses on the nights when workers read, wrote, educated themselves, and dreamed, instead of sleeping. Moreover, Rancière valorizes all forms of communal projects

13 Althusser, For Marx, p. 113. 14 Davis, Jacques Rancière, pp.  9–​11. 15 Althusser, For Marx, p. 24.

The Event

15

that orthodox Marxists discarded, such as Saint-​Simonianism, which combined egalitarian reform with exuberant mysticism. The decade-​long struggle against the influence of the maître savant entered a decisive stage in May 1968 when the events in Paris brought a chance to delegitimize scientific discourse and open a new field of possibilities.

The Event In the scientistic order, an event remains a surface effect: it gains meaning only in relation to the structure that determines it. Many intellectuals have tried to reduce the youth revolt to a source determinant or a set of determinants. Sociologists such as Raymond Aron argued that young people rebel because it is the law of youth, besides, universities are overcrowded, so students resemble “rats or other animals, forced to live at an excessive density, in a confined space.”16 Communist intellectuals like Althusser denied the riots a subversive character, because they believed there can be no revolutionary action without a revolutionary theory. Therefore, they all assumed the role of the police, assuring that “nothing happened, nothing changed, there is nothing to see.”17 Let us recall the indictment of Althusser’s Lesson, this all aimed at strengthening their position in accordance with the principle that the transmission of scientific knowledge –​ accessible to the few  –​is the remedy for the ignorance of the masses and the precondition of truly revolutionary action. However, unexpectedly, the student revolt taught the older generation of intellectuals a lesson: “cut off from revolutionary practice, there is no revolutionary theory that is not transformed into its opposite” (AL 154). Rancière realized that the whole system of knowledge transmission is based on the assumption that the little ones need a guide to lead them out of the darkness of ignorance: intellectuals must renew this assumption by fashioning themselves as sages and describing the masses as addled by the prevailing ideology. The essential point of reference remains the generational experience of les soixante-​huitards, namely the discovery of the gap between Marxist theory and real emancipation forms. Les soixante-​huitards witnessed the negation of the traditional explicative model, according to which the task of the progressive

16 R.  Aron, The Elusive Revolution:  Anatomy of Student Revolt, New York:  Praeger 1969, p. 41. 17 K. Ross, “Sociology and the Police” in: K. Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2002, pp. 19–​27.

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intellectual is to know the mechanisms of the social system in and out and explain them to those who suffer from its inequalities to arm them for battle. As a result of this negation, a different approach was born, that is, one based on the “search for sources:” one must despise the abstract knowledge of philosophers and preachers and reconcile with simple people to recognize social injustice from pure, unmediated experience. Rancière quickly noticed that these two models formed a non-​alternative system, based on the mutual blackmail of truth and political efficiency (ES 18). Neither of these propositions was convincing to him. In a famous essay by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée 68, all revolutionary thought produced in the 1960s appears as an intellectual and rhetorical aberration. Ferry and Renaut fashion a philosophical constellation in which they place Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, and Bourdieu, and then characterize it in terms of anti-​humanism, which is to accuse traditional humanism of becoming an accomplice to oppression, with totalitarianism always looming on the horizon. Ferry and Renaut discover common features in the intellectual structure of the 1960s: the reign of the end time theme and the paradigm of genealogy, the destruction of the idea of truth, the historicization of concepts, the end of references to universality, and action brought against the subject. The thought of 1968 even has its own style with a characteristic cult of paradox and refusal of clarity.18 Although the essay largely creates its object by combining and reducing to a common ground completely unrelated philosophical phenomena, it remains an interesting symptom by indicating a compulsive aversion to thought that refuses any foundation, be it ontological, epistemological, or axiological. In an extensive study entitled La pensée anti-​68,19 Serge Audier organizes this matter and distinguishes several different strategies of attack on the “anti-​ humanist” thought of the period. In particular, Audier identifies: a right-​wing offensive that rejects the radical interpretation of the hermeneutics of suspicion and psychoanalysis, accusing them of “intellectual terrorism,” namely the systematic “dismemberment” of the state, national, Church, and family structures;20

18 L. Ferry, A. Renaut, La pensée 68. Essai sur l’anti-​humanisme contemporain, Paris: Gallimard 1985, pp. 20–​41. 19 S.  Audier, La pensée anti-​68. Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle, Paris: La Découverte 2008. 20 J. Sevilla writes that “La pensée 68 pulverise tout,” in:  Le Terrorisme Intellectuel, Paris: Perrin 2000, p. 88.

The Event

17

a neoconservative depreciation compares the incomprehensible “parade of socialist and communist ideas” to “archeo-​Marxist madness;”21 a conservative rhetoric of cultural pessimism revolving around the motif of “loss” in a rapidly globalizing world; the “perdition” of (truth-​seeking discourses), and “ingratitude” (heirs to a great culture who pursue nothing more than the redistribution of recognition);22 the ultra-​leftist onslaught based on the topicality of a “betrayal of ideals,”23 and a liberal counteroffensive calling for the abandonment of suspicion and a renewed trust in democratic institutions.24 Significantly, none of these critique remarks refers to Rancière’s philosophy, as he develops his strongly ambivalent attitude to the legacy of Marx and Freud without abandoning emancipatory ideals, and combines distrust toward institutions with the conviction that they are where political moments are recorded. Rancière defends the importance of the event and emphasizes its formative power. He would probably agree with Antonio Negri, who says in his memoirs that “the nineteen sixty-​eight was not a revolution –​it was the reinvention of the production of life,” and that its subversiveness consisted in the abolition of existing divisions: Domination and power are clever: they reigned over life because they understood that it had to be divided up –​into work, emotions, the public, the private –​to be conquered. From this point of view, the recomposition of life was fundamental: one of the slogans of the 1970s was “We want it all.” This is what is important: everything.25

The maximalism of aspiration manifested in the movement of abolishing divisions: this is an idea close to Rancière (although discourse in which the concept of “power” is so prominent is completely foreign to him). Rancière privatizes this experience: he willingly mentions that the turning point in his biography was not the participation in street fights but reading the nineteenth-​century epistolography. Here is a description of a Sunday trip to the countryside by a journeyman. These are not the notes of a proletarian who rests in his free time,

21 J.-​F.  Revel, La Grande Parade. Essai sur la survie de l’utopie socialiste, Paris: The Éditions Plon 2000, p. 243. 22 A.  Finkielkraut, A. Robitaille, L’ingratitude:  Conversation sur notre temps, Paris: Gallimard 2000. 23 G.  Hocqenghem, Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary, Marseille: Agone 2003. 24 R.  Boudon, Pourquoi les intellectuels n’aiment pas le libéralisme, Paris: Odile Jacob 2004. 25 A.  Negri, Negri on Negri: Antonio Negri with Anne Dufourmentelle, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, London and New York: Routledge 2004, pp. 22–​23.

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regaining strength before the next week of work. It is a collection of impressions, the story of an aesthete who spends his time indulging in pastimes reserved for the well-​born: contemplating shapes and shadows, posing questions, and pondering philosophical hypotheses. It is an account of a spontaneous intrusion into the world of upper-​class pleasures that proves three things at once. First, the contemplative glance is an action, and the worker turns out to be a thinker, like anyone who entrusts himself to the play of sensory impressions, words, and ideas. We abandon the inegalitarian tautology imposed by the model of the intellectual (“those who think think—​that is, only those to whom thinking belongs;” MP 83).26 The gap between the intellectuals and the workers is erased in the name of the inherent rights of the intelligence without privilege. Second, the class division is disturbed: this worker is a guest both in the world of aristocratic pleasures and within his social class. We are only seemingly immobilized on different levels of the social structure. Classes are more like collective enactments than historically permanent structures, and their “representatives” are individuals becoming subjects according to prescribed scenarios, but also capable of improvisation. Third, there occurs the reveal of the power of “errant letter” (mots errants, lettres errantes; MOE 72) which have no specific sender and can drag individuals out of their place in the hierarchy. For Rancière, this profound feeling of similarity based on pre-​established equality aroused by an uneducated inhabitant of a distant epoch becomes a proper event; a blow that comes from above, following the conversion model. However, Rancière refuses to grammaticalize this experience, he does not seek its theoretical apprehension like Alain Badiou: For me, the possibility that an action –​walking in a street, looking out of the window, screening a film, people emerging onto the avenue, a show –​might be an event in a possibility that can’t be axiomatized based on axiomatics of the event (MOE 64).

Rancière chooses arduous archival research of the labor movement to undermine the temptation of Theory. This sudden change remains convergent with the epoch’s intellectual climate, with its growing criticism of the principle of authority (growing since Barthes’s Mythologies to Foucault’s History of Madness) and its attempts to “introduce a sensivity, a certain astonishment” (MP 26–​27),27 26 Translation from the ebook version of the English translation of J. Rancière, Moments Politiques: Interventions 1977–​2009, trans. M. Foster, New York: Seven Stories Press 2014, n.p. 27 Translation from the ebook version of the English translation of Rancière, Moments Politiques, n.p.

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it also seems loosely linked to the revolt of ‘68, violently turning against all belonging in the name of unfettered freedom. Rancière decides to be faithful to a private event and at the same time to defend with conviction the generational insurrection, rejecting the arguments of all those who, like Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, argue that the uprising of the baby boomers did not lead to any changes, but only benefited capitalism, enabling its mutation and regeneration under the banner of creativity, imagination, flexibility, and individualism.28 In these kinds of speeches, Rancière sees the old logic of demystification: some wander among false diagnoses, while others analyze the winding lines of their trajectory and reveal a system of real determinants. While some take to the barricades in the name of equality ideals, others recognize the futility of their actions. The latter are condemned to the routine of exposure and ultimately to cynicism (OS 46–​47).

Logic Revolts Meanwhile, the 1970s in France become the scene of a specific philosophical counterrevolution. According to Perry Anderson’s diagnosis, by 1980 Paris had turned into the capital of “European intellectual reaction.”29 The basic dimensions of the intellectual space were delineated by the “new philosophy” movement demanding from the intellectual left some justification of the Gulag, by the liberal thought of Raymond Aron rediscovering as precursors of conservative politics Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tockeville, and finally by the revisionist historiography of François Furet, and the critical reinterpretation of ‘68 thought of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. The example of “nouvelle philosophie” (Christian Jambet, Maurice Clavel, André Glucksmann, Bernard-​Henri Lévy, and others) seems particularly instructive. It was movement that emerged from the breakup of the revolutionary group La Gauche prolétarienne (in 1973). Its former members either attempted to preserve Marxist principles, save them from a democracy identified with capitalism’s propaganda, or they devoted themselves to a profound critique of Marxism, taking into account its totalitarian profile, portraying the communist revolutions as the work of masters of suspicion who infected simple folk with insane ideas (SP 305). Bernard-​Henri Lévy blames Marx himself for the Gulag, arguing that Marx succumbed to an Edenic-​primitivist conception of Nature

28 L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard 1999. 29 P.  Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London: Verso 1983, p. 32.

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and Source.30 André Glucksmann recognizes in the modern maîtres du soupçon a kind of “theoretical idiocy,” that is, a thoughtless construction of the Dogma of Innocence which man enjoyed at the beginning of history and that which can be regained in a future socialist paradise.31 Rejecting the possibility of revolutionary change is the first step in this intense intellectual counter-​revolution,32 the second is based on the diagnosis of the contemporary civilizational catastrophe: Western democracies are sick and scarily defenseless against the dangers of external (a new, integristic barbarism taking the form of religious fanaticism) and internal (the progressive infantilization of mass culture, for which there are no longer any alternatives) kind. In this style of thinking Rancière finds a characteristic feedback of two elements: the old reactionary wisdom proclaiming that every attempt to establish social justice ends in totalitarian terror (MP 11), and the republican figure of the master, “conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls,” who is “representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity” (HD 26). In these years, Rancière works in two modes –​polemical opposition and creative reconstruction –​which is reflected in two strands of publications. In the first strand, Rancière continues his critique of non-​egalitarian thought, that is, Althusser’s scientism, Sartre and Bourdieu’s “Parmenidean Marxism” built on a Platonic lie (Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, 1983), while in the second strand, he explores the “archives of dreams” and presents emancipatory processes in terms of aesthetic revolutions, focusing on figures of the revolted proletarian (La Parole ouvrière, 1976; La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier, 1981; Louis-​ Gabriel Gauny: Le philosophe plébéien, 1985) and the rebellious pedagogue (Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle, 1987). For several years (1975–​ 1981), Rancière edits the journal “Les Révoltes logiques.” Already its title is telling as it is taken from Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem “Democracy,” in which the declaration of allegiance to the Paris Commune of 1871 (an analogy with 1968) is deafened by the cynical voice of authority: “we will massacre logical revolts.”33 The point is to save the memory of past revolts,

30 B.-​H.  Lévy, La Pureté dangereuse, Paris: Éditions Grasset 1994, pp. 112–​129. 31 A.  Glucksmann, Les Maîtres penseurs, Paris: Grasset 1977. See also SP 313. 32 P. Bourdieu, “Le Hit-​parade des intellectuels français ou Qui sera juge de la légitimité des juges?,” in: P. Bourdieu, Homo academicus, Paris: Editions de Minuit 1984, annexe 3. 33 A. Rimbaud, “Democracy,” in: A Season in Hell and Illuminations, trans. B. Mathieu, New York: BOA Editions 1991, p. 187.

Map of the Possible

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to extract them from the framework of official historiography, in which they are invariably listed as failures, and to renew the promise they contain. A revolt remains distinct from revolution as a spontaneous and unorganized action, but it has its own logic. It is not an eruption of popular anger released from the custody of a disciplinary state, nor an expression of historical necessity, but “a particular assembly of reasons at a specific place and time.”34 In dozens of texts published in Les Révoltes logiques (subsequently collected in the volume Les Scènes du Peuple, 2003), Rancière develops a meticulous analysis of “grassroots thought” in which countless forms of rebellion blend. He describes the contingent (dependent on changing historical circumstances and coincidence) scene of thought and word on which individual and group identities form and dissolve. Rancière proves that “there is no single ‘voice of the people.’ There are broken, polemical voices, each time dividing the identity they present.”35 His research will lead him toward a variety of cartographic exercises: attempts to theorize politics and democracy as a kind of “map of the possible,” aesthetic reflection on “distribution of the sensible,” and specific interpretations of works of literature, art, and film as places for negotiating boundaries and founding communities.

Map of the Possible Scholars tried to find strong breaking points in Rancière’s thought. In fact, many argue that the transition from politics to poetics and then from poetics to aesthetics was decisive for the dynamics of his thought.36 They divide it into stages, depending on the main subject of interest: (1) the relations of knowledge and power, critique of Althusser’s discourse; (2) a journey to the heart of the workers’ word, an analysis of deregulated discourses’ mechanics; (3) a reworking of political philosophy that confuses politics with police, the concept of distribution of the sensible; (4) distribution of the sensible in artistic practice, first literature, then art, cinema, and architecture.37 The drawback of these taxonomies is that they ignore the connections between successive philosophical interventions and immobilize the work of thought and concepts in a system of disciplines. For

34 J. Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, trans. D. Fernbach, London and New York: Verso 2011, ebook version, n.p. 35 Rancière, Staging the People, ebook version, n.p. 36 J-​P. Deranty, “Introduction: A Journey in Equality,” in: Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, eds. J-​P. Deranty, London and New York: Routledge 2010, pp. 8–​14. 37 Ch.  Ruby, L’Interruption. Jacques Rancière et la politique, Paris: La Fabrique Éditions 2009, pp.  10–​13.

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example, where should we situate Les Noms de l’histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir (1992), a small book that opens a period of great indisciplinary offensive? The book critiques the modern history of ideas, the history of mentality and custom, and the Annales school. Rancière argues that historical sciences’ predilection for immovable units of “longue durée” has a police function, namely it is to neutralize the potential of individual events and territorialize redundant word, making it manifest the way of being. Moreover, the book formulates a project of the poetics of knowledge, suggesting we must analyze the literary procedures by which historical discourse grants itself the status of science. Rancière argues that through such analyses, we can recover the past with all its subversive potential and construct a non-​reductionist and non-​deterministic “anthropology of struggle” (ETP 36). What does this controversial essay share with publications on political philosophy, aesthetics, and art history? Thinking in terms of the “possible.” As Rancière says, “any state of affairs is always the landscape of the possibility, and there exist changes in this landscape of the possibility” (MOE 64). The “possible” is not the opposite of the “real” but its hidden dimension. It defines itself not in opposition to the “impossible” but to the “necessary.” It does not identify with the imaginative or utopian, as it is not something awaiting its own actualization. The “possible” defines a way of thinking about what is: it is “It is reality, an existence that is not performed within the conditions of its existence, it’s an excess in relation to the conditions of its existence. And so, by the same token, it defines something like another possible world” (MOE 147). Its mode of existence seems problematic: it is a spectral entity on the edges of perception and disappearance. There are forces that stabilize the distribution of the sensible and erase all potentiality for change and those that seek to transform the relationship between the perceptible, the expressible, and the feasible. Rancière calls the first force “police,” the second one “politics.” The conceptual game in Aux bords du politique (1990), supplemented by further terms in La Mésentente (1995), links all of Rancière’s writings with a secret bond. Indeed, the policing character appears in both scientific discourses subject to the principle of authority –​philosophical (Althusser, Sartre), sociological (Bourdieu), or historiographical (Febvre) –​and traditional pedagogical methods (the Old Method from Le Maître ignorant) or aesthetic theories based on the sublime and the inexpressible (Lyotard). Two other policing tendencies gain voice in the 1990s, which Rancière tries to repel from different philosophical and journalistic positions. The first one is the triumphalist end of history linked to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, reinforced by political (Fukuyama) and sociological (Lipovetsky) reflection, along with pop-​postmodern multiculturalism. This is a set of parameters that defines

Map of the Possible

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consensual times (Chronique des temps consensuels, 2005). In the consensual community, data and solutions to problems are assumed to be virtually undisputed. There emerges a specific Denkverbot38 –​a ban on thinking –​that gives full power to the new oligarchs. Paradoxically, a similar effect is produced by the frontal critique of degenerated modern democracy and the mystified “return of politics” that happens in a space once again divided into the private and the public, meaning the social and the political. First, Rancière defends democracy from its opponents (La haine de la démocratie, 2005), for he believes there is no crisis of democracy, only a widening gap between its meaning and that to which people attempt to reduce it (MP 175), between its emancipatory potential and its police negation. Rancière argues that democracy is neither a civilizational “achievement” nor something we can possess or that would allow itself to be established. We do not live “in democracies” but in states of oligarchic law, whose power is limited by democratic processes. The very procedure of appointing political representation is anti-​democratic in its core, for the essence of democracy is the lottery. Democracy is an-​archic, because it breaks with the logic of arché; it defines itself as the rule of those who have no title to power. Democracy incessantly coagulates into oligarchy, which the egalitarian impulse detonates from the inside. Democracy remains a permanent scandal, because it shows that the rule of societies can only be based on its own contingency. Second, Rancière proves that “the supposed purification of the political, freed from domestic and social necessity, is tantamount to the pure and simple reduction of the political to the state” (DOP 28). Thus, he ruthlessly criticizes the entire tradition of political philosophy, which he regards as a set of thought operations designed to abolish the scandal of politics and democracy, define the legal government, and reduce the rationality of dissent. In fact, this tradition institutes the conceptual annulment of politics through establishing an archi-​, para-​, meta-​, or post-​political framework (each demanding a separate discussion). Furthermore, Rancière calls for the rejection of Foucault’s concept of power, which leads to the claim that “everything is political.” Indeed, police order extends far beyond specialized institutions and techniques, but nothing is political by itself, by the very fact that it is subject to the practices of power. For a thing to become political,

38 Slavoj Žižek willingly uses this expression as for him Denkverbot means above all the prohibition to question the prevailing liberal-​democratic, “postideological” consensus. S. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, New York: Verso 2004, p. 167.

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it must be the meeting point of surveillance and egalitarian logics. The same event –​election, protest, demonstration –​may create space for politics or not. This is the only context, in which we can understand Rancière’s alleged “turn to aesthetics” in the 1990s. Some say that Rancière simultaneously engaged in the theoretical elaboration of “aesthetic regimes” and attempts at the practical application of thusly organized toolbox. Therefore, on the one hand, we encounter among his works treatises reinterpreting originally Kantian legacy (Le Partage du sensible, 2000; L’Inconscient esthétique, 2001; Malaise dans l’esthétique, 2004), while on the other hand –​collections of interpretations of nineteenth and twentieth century literature (Courts voyages au Pays du people, 1990; Mallarmé, la politique de la sirène, 1996; La Chair des mots, 1998; La Parole muette, 1998; Politique de la littérature, 2007; Les bords de la fiction, 2017), contemporary theater (Le Spectateur émancipé, 2008), and cinema (La Fable cinématographique, 2001; Les Écarts du cinema, 2011; Béla Tarr, le temps d’après, 2011). The problem is that Rancière once again escapes such a disciplinary grasp. On the one hand, he does not separate theoretical and interpretive work. Each systematization arises from specific artistic material, and each interpretation becomes an occasion for inventive conceptual work. On the other hand, he does not consider the boundaries between art fields, which is best exemplified by Aisthesis (2011) and Les temps modernes (2018), in which poetry, photography, or dance are treated as types of interventions in the collective sensorium that reconfigure the sensible and draw maps of the possible. In this book, I seek to avoid police discursive practices as much as possible: I do not classify, I do not establish moments of rupture, I do not construct dichotomous schemes, but I present existing conceptual pairs in their relational dynamics. I wish to read Rancière following the politics of dialectical montage aimed at discovering distant affinities and separating interrelated elements. In the preface to Takashi Shirania’s book Deleuze et une philosophie de l’immanence, Rancière writes that Shirania wants “to be alone” with Deleuze, but “Gilles Deleuze” is the name of a block of texts. The philosopher’s thoughts are never exclusively his, hence the work also deals with stoics, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche. Circulating among references, Shirania shows how Deleuze’s thought is composed of borrowed singularities, which does not diminish its originality.39 My “being alone” with Rancière has a similar effect, which is why the main protagonists of this paper are thinkers from different

39 J. Rancière, “Préface,” in:  T. Shirani, Deleuze et une philosophie de l’immanence, Paris: L’Harmattan 2006, pp. 5–​9.

Map of the Possible

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eras (Kant, Schiller, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lyotard, or Badiou) and writers close to Rancière (Flaubert, Brecht) and those distant from his aesthetic preferences (Jacob, Nabokov, Roth).40

40 A similar challenge was posed by J. Harvey, Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018, p. 18, who by choosing contemporary cinematic pictures in which “inventive games with film form” produce a political effect, far exceeds the canon he proposes.

I The Aesthetic Revolution She sat down and resumed her work, a white cotton stocking she was darning; she sat with her head bent over it, not speaking. Charles did not speak either. A draught of air from under the door stirred a little dust on the flagstones; he watched it slowly move, hearing only the pounding inside his head and the distant cry of a laying hen in the yard. –​Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary41

Emma’s Crime As is well known, Emma Bovary committed suicide. Before taking poison, she wrote a note in which she clearly states: “Let no one be blamed.”42 Why did she decide to take this step? The plot suggests answers: she could not pay the debts incurred due to her extramarital affairs. At the root of her nervous breakdown, we find unfulfilled hopes and painful disillusionment resulting from a fundamental mistake, namely that Emma wanted to live by the patterns suggested by novels. In other words, she confused literature with life. There are also political interpretations in which Emma’s failure in life resulted from defective education, social alienation, or domination of men. Jacques Rancière returns to Madame Bovary in his subsequent books as he finds both sets of answers unsatisfactory. Political interpretations rely on a suspicious leap from internal fictional to social arguments, thus ignoring the sphere between the external and the internal:  the invention of the fiction itself (WE 234). Moreover, we cannot be satisfied with the explanation that Emma “had mistaken literature for life,” like Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Neither Emma nor Don Quixote fall prey to their illusions. They both demonstrate a good understanding of the relationship between reality and fiction, and they consciously induce certain optical illusions, meaning they create a world in which what is read can be seen. Their supposed madness is an intervention in the general wisdom expressed by Cervantes’s innkeeper and Flaubert’s Charles Bovary. Against the general-​wisdom keepers, Emma and Don Quixote want to see the world as a

41 G.  Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. M. Mauldon, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004, p. 22. 42 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, p. 315.

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literary continuum. Thus, they do not so much take fiction for reality as they blur the line between the two, celebrating the gesture of refusal: they refuse to accept to capture fiction in its proper space (FW 89–​90, 109). Supposedly, Cervantes used a book by a doctor from Navarre, Juan Huarte de San Juan, The Examination of Men’s Wits, from which he derived the belief that there are two kinds of madness: one affects judgment, the other imagination. Don Quixote, the knight-​errant, suffers only from the disorder of imaginatio not vis aestimativa.43 The same disease afflicts Emma. As Ortega y Gasset writes, “madame Bovary is a Don Quixote in skirts.” However, this analogy only serves him to formulate another anathema of modern times. Emma is to be “a leader of romantic novels and a representative of the bourgeois ideals which have hovered over Europe for half a century. Wretched ideals! Bourgeois democracy, positivist romanticism!”44 Far from the haughty aristocratism of modern mandarins,45 Rancière disarms this unexacting analogy. Emma is not Don Quixote transported to the nineteenth century. She embodies the egalitarian element in the age of social revolutions, channeled in a way that turns it into the process of aestheticizing life. Between the era of Cervantes and the time of Flaubert, a great change occurred, which we may call the transition from ancien régime to the society of excitement. Earlier, the social body was clearly structured by monarchical and class order and by religion, each individual had a specific role in a clear, stable hierarchy. However, because of the French Revolution, industrialization, and media development, this system fell into disrepair, about which complain countless conservatives. Society had become “a hustle and bustle of free and equal individuals that were dragged together into a ceaseless whirl in search of an excitement. … an unrelenting turmoil of thoughts and desires, appetites and frustrations” (WE 235). At this point, Rancière makes a significant substitution, as he inserts “democracy” in the position of “excitement.” It is democracy  –​understood as a form of people’s government  –​ that mobilized crowds in the Revolutions of 1848. After suppressing the insurgency and restituting the old order, the actual anti-​ democratic crusade began:

43 A.  Trapiello, Żywoty Cervantesa. Próba innej biografii, trans. P. Fornelski, Warsaw: Oficyna Literacka Noir sur Blanc 2012, pp. 193–​194. 44 J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, New York: W. W. Norton and Company 1961, p. 162. 45 M.  Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, New York: Penguin Books 1988, p. 28.

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But it was not enough to crush it by force. They had to annul its political significance, make it a mere sociological phenomenon. Therefore a new democratic ghost was substituted for the older; political democracy, they said, had been crushed, but there was a new, far more radical uprising of democracy that no police, no army could tear down: the uprising of the multitude of aspirations and desires, cropping up everywhere in all the pores of modern society. To be sure, the idea was not exactly new; Plato had invented it two millennia before by stating that democracy, in fact, was not a form of government but the way of life of those “free” Athenians who cared for nothing except their individual pleasure. The modern antidemocrats translated it into a more dramatic version, as the uprising of the multitude of unleashed social atoms, greedy to enjoy everything that was enjoyable: gold, indeed, and all the things that gold can buy, but also, what was worse, all that gold cannot buy –​passions, values, ideals, art, and literature (WE 235–​236).

Emma Bovary embodies this democratic appetite characterizing the new times. Her main imperative remains the drive for everyday life aestheticization. What does this process entail? There are two competing descriptions that situate the aestheticization processes at the heart of modernity and the center of postmodernity. Mike Featherstone links aestheticization with the figure of a dandy who makes his body, feelings, and passions into a work of art, or with the projects of the “artistic subcultures” of the twenties like Futurism, Dadaism, or Surrealism. Processes of aestheticizing life are rooted in modern art’s transgressions and the carnivalesque tradition of inverting customs.46 In turn, Wolfgang Welsch distinguishes superficial aestheticization processes (“styling,” “face-​lifting” reality) from deep ones –​connected with mass media development, social reality derealization, and the relativization of truths and values. For Welsch, the model example of a postmodern world’s inhabitant is a sensual, hedonistic homo aestheticus.47 Rancière distance himself from both these descriptions not only because he rejects the notions of “modernity” and “postmodernity.” Above all, he duplicates the captured notion and plays on its internal contradictions by describing two opposing processes of aestheticization. One of them is to be practiced by Emma Bovary, another by Flaubert himself. Emma Bovary seeks a way to combine literature and life, she does not want to separate sensual pleasures from spiritual ones. As “a woman of false poetry and of false feelings,”48 she is both sentimental and sober, thus expecting very specific 46 M.  Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London: Sage Publications London 2007. 47 W. Welsch, “Aestheticization Processes:  Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects,” Theory, Culture and Society 13.1/​1996, pp. 1–​24. 48 G. Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. Il, ed. J. Bruneau, Pléiade: Paris 1980, pp. 696–​697.

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pleasures from literature and art. That is her cardinal sin: she seeks to equalize all sources of excitement. Her crime is that she wants to reduce literature to easy beauty, to turn mystical longings into home décor: The temptation of putting art in “real” life has to be singled out in one character and sentenced to death in the figure of that character, the character of the bad artist or the mistaken artist. Emma’s death is a literary death. She is sentenced as a bad artist, who handles in the wrong way the equivalence of art and nonart. Art has to be set apart from the aestheticization of life (WE 240).

In some interpretations, Emma appears as a victim of modernity –​a machine that produces destructive, alienating illusions49 –​as a victim of apparent emancipation (liberation of desires) associated with patriarchal supervision (imprisonment in the province, in the domain of private life, in the role of a bourgeois matron)50 or as a proto-​consumer of mass culture.51 In  Politics of Literature, Emma embodies the modern dream of melding reality and dream into one, of the ultimate fusion of the spiritual and the corporeal. However, this dream assumes a dangerous, morbid form, which is why Emma must die. Flaubert sacrifices her life to save art –​not from commonness, as some argue, but from sophistication. Flaubert is not at all a precursor of l’art pour l’art, but on the contrary, a precursor of the war between art and “aestheticism.” In Madame Bovary, the war is waged using two parallel strategies. One suggests we create the figure of a “false artist” to lead Emma through life’s miseries toward inevitable punishment. The other assumes demonstrating the correct approach to the indistinguishability of life and art. Rancière interprets Madame Bovary against the reactionary comments of the ancien régime’s defenders and against Sartre’s progressive theses from The Family Idiot. In this unfinished work, Sartre sketches a psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert, integrating him into contemporary landscape. He interprets Flaubert’s work and biography as peculiar reflections of the characteristics of certain social groups. In Flaubert, Sartre views the model figure of an artist rejected by his class who in truth wants nothing more than to re-​enter the elite. Indeed, Flaubert clearly perceives the vices of his class and reacts to them with radical

49 M. Chollet, La tyrannie de la réalité, Paris: Gallimard 2006. 50 L. Gerrard, “Romantic Heroines in the Nineteenth-​Century Novel: A Feminist View,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 7/​1984, pp.  10–​16. 51 R. Chow, J. Rohruber, “On Captivation:  A  Remainder from the ‘Indistinction of Art and Noart,’” in: Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, eds. P. Bowman, R. Stamp, London: Continuum 2011, pp. 58–​59.

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opposition, but he simultaneously cannot adopt the viewpoint of the dominated classes. This is accompanied by a sense of guilt, because he does not change the world as a writer, remaining only a “creator of shadows.” Thus, Flaubert finds a way out of this impasse: he decides to not be useful, to not interfere in anything. He chooses unreality and “bird’s-​eye thinking:” he wants to perceive everything as it is. According to Sartre, Flaubert is to deprive words the possibility of participating in public debates, which in fact serves bourgeois nihilism, which only gains strength after June 1848. Sartre juxtaposes the lively, active word of prose and the intransitive word of poetry. The former provides direct access to the sphere of meanings and ideas, while the latter is defined by purely sensory qualities like colors in the art of painting. Such a dichotomy leads to the question: Why does Flaubert deny the communal vocation of prose? The answer is obvious:  it is the combination of subjective neurosis and the neurosis of his times that leads to this “corruption of the literary medium.” The petrification of language due to the author’s personal afflictions is a part of the nihilistic endeavor of the bourgeoisie to suppress the threatening development of productive forces. “Art for art’s sake” suspends communicative functions and is the “cover that writers and artists draw in advance over the bourgeoisie” to protect specific class interest.52 In Rancière’s approach, there is no place for the opposition of the referential word and the intransitive word, nor is there any contradiction between autonomy and engagement. The paradoxical status of literature as a new regime of art in Madame Bovary translates both into plot units (Emma Bovary is the embodiment of the “bad artist” who is severely punished for her crime against art) and demonstrated in practice, embodied into new poetics: “The democratic excitement of the character and the democratic impassibility of the writer are the two sides of the same coin, or two strains of the same disease” (WE 237). Sartre turns a reactionary argument into a progressive one. Like Flaubert’s contemporaries such as Barbey d’Aurevilly, Sartre interprets the poetics of Flaubert’s novel (equalization of styles, abolition of thematic hierarchies and narrative plans) as a haughty disinterestedness, a renunciation of political commitment. However, Madame Bovary is a work that  –​while carrying no message –​is egalitarian because of its indifference which suspends all preferences and hierarchies. It is political because it refrains from any political intervention (POA 56). The generalized indifference of literature remains closely linked to

52 J.-​P.  Sartre, The Family Idiot, Vol. 5., trans. C. Cosman, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1993, p. 619.

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democratic processes, namely with the massification of the ideals of universal equality and freedom.

Liberty, Equality, Indifference How can the same writer be regarded a prototypical realist and master of “art for art’s sake?” Rancière explains that the paradox is apparent, because realism and pure art are like the obverse and reverse of the same coin. They must appear simultaneously in the new regime of literature’s visibility. As we know, Flaubert declares that there are no high and low subjects, that a provincial girl can be the heroine of a tragedy just like heroes or knights, and that Yvetot is worth as much as Constantinople.53 We can understand the revolutionary power of these proclamations only when we recall that the former belles-​lettres system clearly separated poetic and prosaic subjects, dignified and vulgar figures, elevated and trivial expressions. The basis of this distinction was Aristotle’s opposition of poetry and history: poetry is to build intrigue, construct chains of events, and “express the universal,” making it more philosophical; history is to present life in a purely chronological order, or “expresses what is particular.”54 Rancière translates this dichotomy into the language of social difference: According to the latter, there were, on the one hand, people who acted, who dedicated themselves to the pursuit of great designs or ends and faced the chances and misfortunes inherent to such a pursuit. And there were, on the other hand, people –​mostly women –​ who were satisfied with living, reproducing life, and looking after their living. Now the emergence of literature went along with the collapse of the hierarchical distribution of the sensible that aligned poetic distinctions with the distinction between two kinds of humanity (WE 237).

Thus, the result of abolishing the hierarchy of subjects is double. It is not only the detabooization of mundane life that is at stake but also the dismantling of a representational framework, distribution of the sensible, and abolition of the symbolic division into two categories of people: those destined for great deeds and those imprisoned in the circle of everyday worry. The theme becomes indifferent in the sense that its class provenance or social importance are irrelevant, while it does not determine the form of the work itself as it happened with the principle of theme-​genre-​style appropriateness applied by the belles-​lettres system. The democracy of themes, characters, and objects is a radical form of

53 G.  Flaubert, Correspondance, Vol. 2, Paris: Gallimard 1980, p. 362. 54 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, New York: Cosimo Classics 2008, p. 11.

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equality that destroys representation hierarchies and undermines the social body’s structure. The supposed apoliticality of Flaubert and other writers who abandon social commitment in favor of the cult of pure art is a part of literary egalitarianism embedded in the idea of “equality in indifference.” This constitutes part of the aesthetic separation that determines the democratic reconfiguration of the sensible (POA 14). At this point, we encounter another problem. Violating the system of divisions and differences leads to the diffusion of literature and life. From now on, there is no demarcation line separating these two orders. Formed on the ruins of the belles-​lettres system, the condition of literature is defined by its fall into indistinguishability from life itself and its attempt to define its own specificity, a renewed differentiation. Flaubert immediately recognized the consequences of thematic democratization: when matter is irrelevant, style remains the only determinant of literature. In a letter to Louise Colet of January 16, 1852, Flaubert writes that because there are no objects ugly or pretty in themselves, then there should be an axiom that from Art’s perspective, style is “the absolute manner of seeing things.”55 In the same letter, Flaubert describes his dream “work that contains the least matter,” one that would be cohesive only through the internal force of style;56 in other words, it would stage its unity with the banality of life, but in a way that would make it literature. When disappear the hierarchies that once ruled the selection of themes, composition of action, and shaping of language, it is but style that introduces artistic difference. It is style that moves the boundaries of literature, seizes previously despised areas of social life and sensual experience, simultaneously incorporating them into a separate area and establishing art’s sole authority. Matter is perfectly indifferent to style; style distinguishes not among themes, itself being the difference that allows literature as literature to exist. This is the principle of style that annuls the contradiction between realism and art for art’s sake.57

55 “C’est pour cela qu’il n’y a ni beaux ni vilains sujets et qu’on pourrait presque établir comme axiome, en se posant au point de vue de l’Art pur, qu’il n’y en a aucun, le style étant à lui tout seul une manière absolue de voir les choses.” G. Flaubert, The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. and ed. F. Steegmuller, New York: Books of Libraries Press 1971, p. 128. 56 Flaubert, The Selected Letters, p. 128. 57 With modernism seemingly evolving to extend the principle of indistinguishability into the domain of language. “The key difference between Flaubert’s generation and Joyce’s thus consisted in a shift from the claim that there were neither beautiful nor vile subjects, provided all were held compact in the matrix of a rigorous, impersonal style, to the still

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“The absolute manner of seeing things” means both a negation of the belles-​ lettres system and escaping the perception-​thought patterns. Writing becomes the sort of looking that enables us to see things in their pure materiality. It is absolute in character, because according to the word’s etymology, it is based on a rupture. First, writing breaks with relations of appropriateness of words, characters, and actions imposed by the representational regime (MS 116–​117). Second, writing separates itself from the social norms of organizing reality, namely from the existing distributions of the sensible. This involves a way of looking and feeling in which the individual subject disappears and things are liberated from all ties, persisting “as pure sensations, disconnected from the sensorium of ordinary experience” (WE 241). It is a quasi-​mystical experience of the kind that the Devil presents to Saint Anthony: when sensations abandon fetters of individuality, we discover strange forms of impersonal, pre-​individual life.58 This absolute way of seeing is characteristic of Flaubert but remains alien to the characters of his novels. They are not satisfied with a collection of microevents, they try to subject the events to a “true story” marked by passions, aspirations, and plot twists. They experience “the pure intensity of things without reason … the breathing of things delivered from meanings”59 (P 35), but they do not stay true to that experience, incorporating it into the chain of life’s plot. This is a double mistake: They mistake one art for another; this means that they are still trapped in the old poetics with its combinations of actions, its characters envisioning great ends, its feelings related to the qualities of persons, its noble passions opposed to everyday experience, and so on. They are out of step with the new poetics that has shattered the hierarchical poetics of action in favor of an “egalitarian” poetics of life. This also means that they mistake one life for another. They still perceive a world of subjects and predicates, things and qualities, wills, ends and means. They think that things and persons have qualities that individualize them and make them desirable and enjoyable. In short, they think that life is defined by aims and purposes. They have not listened to the lesson of the Devil: life has no purpose. It is an eternal flood of atoms that keeps doing and undoing in new configurations (WE 242–​243).

more outrageous claim that there are neither perfect nor imperfect styles.” J. Murphet, “Ineluctable Modality of the Sensible: Poverty and Form in ‘Ulysses,’” in: Rancière and Literature, eds. G. Hellyer, J. Murphet, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2017, p. 211. 58 G.  Flaubert, La Tentation de saint Antoine, 1849 version, Paris: Conrad 1924, p. 418. 5 9 French “la pure intensité des choses sans raison,” “la respiration des choses délivrées de l’empire des significations.”

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Flaubert is to reverse this process and, with a lancet of style, cuts the wholes the characters piece together to reveal the sphere of de-​individuation, in which traditional models of identity unravel, in which “the mind becomes disorganized, where its world splits, where thought bursts into atoms” (FW 149). His gaze continually wanders to a detail irrelevant to the plot. For example, when Emma awaits the arrival of her future husband, the writing foregrounds a trail of dust driven across the stone tiles by a slight blast blowing through a crack in the door. Sensitivity urges the writer to follow the pure flow of sensations, signified by the above image by no mere chance. As Terry Eagleton writes, “dust and grit are signs of the random and accidental. They represent bits of stuff without rhyme or reason, which fail to add up to any total or meaningful design.”60 In Rancière’s language, it is the impersonal world, the domain of becoming, and  heccéités (FW 150). Rancière borrows the term heccéités from Deleuze and  Guattari, which derives from the Latin ecce, “behold,” and has a rich prehistory associated with scholastic philosophy (John Duns Scotus). In the twentieth century, the term was employed by various philosophical traditions like existentialism or Gilbert Simondon’s epistemology. Heccéités denotes a set of tangible or intangible qualities that distinguish an object; unlike quidditas, heccéités entails not permanent characteristics given to a set of phenomena. Deleuze and  Guattari’s Mille Plateaux explain heccéités as processes of individuation, deprived of beginning and end, purpose and destiny, which assume the form of a rhizome, constituting no “self.”61 Molecular multiplicities function as singularities overwhelmed by molar structures, selected and steered by them, subject to coding or axiomatization. As Michał Herer writes: The molar organization can penetrate both the bureaucratic state apparatus and small groups or even individuals, provided that in all these spheres there occurs selection, desire blocking, dismantling of the machinery that it constitutes, or a preventing of their construction. On the other hand, the molecular mechanism is an organization that allows desire to create a productive system, a network of connections and free circulations, regardless of the order of magnitude, and thus in a company, group, or party, as much as at the level of the body and its organs. It is a sub-​individual and sub-​organic mechanism, no matter what kind of individual or organism is involved, a mechanism

60 T.  Eagleton, How to Read Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press 2013, p. 37. 61 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris: Editions de Minuit 1980, pp. 318–​321; A. Sauvagnargues, “Heccéité,” Le Vocabulaire de Gilles Deleuze,” Les Cahiers de Noesis 3/​ 2003, p. 172.

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The Aesthetic Revolution that deterritorializes every form of order, that opens a way out for forces that remain bound by the laws of molar organization.62

Literature can unlock deterritorialized streams of desire, project ways to transcend constituted wholes, and formulate appeal to energies that are yet to solidify into subjective form. Heccéités indicates a transition from definite and defined individuals to the realm of pre-​individuality, from molar to molecular organizations. Personality unravels into a play of affects and sensory data, concrete image into a vibration of colors. This model also has its political dimension: the immobilized mass reveals its substance, its subjectless energy in permanent circulation.63 At the heart of Madame Bovary, under the surface of romantic intrigue, lie pure relations of movement and rest, an indifferent flow of anonymous forces. While Emma transforms heccéités into qualities of things and persons, she drags them into “the turmoil of appetites and frustrations,” Flaubert brings to light the microevents that form the background of life’s plot, he makes us feel “the music of the impersonal, the music of true life, through the noise of her misfortunes” (WE 243). This affects text matter itself:  what derives from this approach are the technique of simultaneous presentation or pictorial passivity’s invasion into literary plot. In short, the additive summing of sensory particles doubles (and sometimes derails) the cause-​and-​effect framework of the story. At this point, literature stands against the molar equality of democratic subjects, choosing the side of the equality of affects and microevents. Literature touches on the ontological equality that prevails at the molecular level analogous to the one for which struggle all the disinherited, even “truer than that demanded by the poor and the workers” (FW 158).

Literature, Medicine, Democracy We observe a similar dynamic in works of Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf. Both raise the aesthetic and political value of sensation. Let us note that sensation is not a synonym for emotion, which after all crystallizes in a determined regime of sensibility. Sensation appears before the distribution of the sensible, breaks the structure of motivation and explication, and it is what conditions

62 M.  Herer, Gilles Deleuze:  struktury, maszyny, kreacje, Kraków:  Universitas 2006, pp.  174–​175. 63 “Entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Dissonance 1/​2004.

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the distribution of feelings and thoughts.64 Sensation is the proper object of art and politics, which dismantle existing structures to point to new possibilities of division. The juxtaposition of these three writing projects reveals their profound unity conditioned by an aesthetic regime. Nevertheless, an important change occurred between Flaubert’s time and that of Proust and Woolf: literature became a “matter of health.” In the mid-​nineteenth century, after the new art regime had stabilized, literature began to play contradictory roles: it became an instance diagnosing a social disease and a silent accomplice in the disease. Its attitude toward the forces permeating the social body remained ambiguous. In the first place, it was about the power of words: Words tear life away from its natural destination. It is what happens when common people, who should care only for living and reproducing life, get elated by such words as liberty and equality and set out to have their say about matters of government, which are none of their business. It is also what happens when young girls like Emma, who are destined to family and country life, get involved in the deadly pursuit of what is meant by such words as bliss, felicity, or ecstasy. This is an old affair that deals with the good order of family and society. But there is a new danger about which the learned persons get increasingly anxious at the time of Flaubert; life is threatened by a new enemy: will (WE 245).

Flaubert’s contemporaries call this disease excitement or hysteria, meaning suffering of the body deprived of an organic cause, associated with an excess of thoughts. They blame for it the modern world, characterized by the dangerous availability of words, images, and thoughts capable of “distracting from duties” and “leading astray.” They equate hysteria with democracy, because they perceive the latter as the domain or “reign of excess” (HD 8). In such a situation, literature emerges as a clinical practice. Flaubert and Proust first propose a diagnosis: the disease consists in the compulsive transformation of impersonal configurations of sensory experiences into qualities of subjects and objects. Employing concepts of schizoanalysis, we may say that productive molecular systems are suppressed by molar organizations like individual and group identities or the state apparatus. Then comes the treatment proposition: democratic hysteria must be confronted with its opposite, namely controlled schizophrenia. The doctor-​writer acquires the status of a healthy schizophrenic who

64 As David Panagia states aphoristically, “sensation is dissensual, organolepsis disorganizes the body.” D. Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press 2009, pp. 146–​147.

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destroys the pathological connections established by the characters, returning them to a pure multiplicity of sensations. Flaubert must create a fictional character like Emma –​his hysterical doppelganger65 –​because this creation keeps him and literature in schizophrenic health (WE 247). What would this paradoxical state of “schizophrenic health” be? Just like in the well-​known deliberations by Frederic Jameson, schizophrenia is a figure of sense neutralization, a rupture in temporal and causative chains, along with the rupture of the identity narrative framework. A schizophrenic is “nobody,” namely the self immersed in the eternal present, in the pure intensification of sensory experience.66 In Rancière’s work, schizophrenia functions as a contingent concept, with which he substitutes “excitement,” “democracy,” “parataxis.” Let us consider the least obvious substitution.  Parataxis denotes a co-​ordinate relationship, connoting equality that acknowledges no hierarchy and refutation of explanatory systems, which seek truth through searching for the source, deveiling, or demystification. Rancière writes that the “great parataxis” was invented by realist writers who discovered the randomness of unbound atoms, a “common factor of dis-​measure or chaos” –​on the one hand, separated by a thin line from the realms of madness, “the great schizophrenic explosion,” while on the other hand, from the “the torpor of the great consent” (FI 45). Literature either exposes the disease of communal numbness or averts its gaze from it. In the first case, to turn itself into an instrument of intervention, literature opens to the standardized smessage of the world and oscillates toward a montage of stereotypes. However, like Dos Passos in the U.S.A trilogy, literature then constructs a new hypotaxis: there is no equivalence of phenomena, everything is subordinated to accuse the ruling class, albeit the accusation nearly disappears in

65 This is where feminist criticism intervenes: such a shift in meaning deprives the concept of hysteria of its historical dimension and extracts it from the structure of patriarchal culture. Flaubert reproduces gender stereotypes by creating a hysterical heroine and sentencing her to death before she can articulate her claims, and Rancière absolves Flaubert of sexism, thus becoming his accomplice. A more general allegation against Rancière would be that he tends to dilute gender issues in the universality of class, privileging figures of the worker and the poor, which cannot be taken as an accurate metaphor for the emancipation of women. In this sense, his reflection itself establishes a police order. I will return to this vein of critique, nevertheless arguing for the operability of Rancière’s general model of emancipation. See T. Chanter, Art, Politics and Rancière: Broken Perceptions, London-​New York 2018, pp. 6–​9; 21. 66 F. Jameson, “Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New York 1991, p. 26.

Regimes of Art

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indifferent chaos, as the circulation of linguistic and mental stereotypes devours the always clear message of class struggle (PdL 37–​38). In the second case, when literature averts its gaze from “consensual numbness,” it begins to gravitate toward a schizophrenic explosion, “where the sentence sinks into the scream and meaning into the rhythm of bodily states” (FI 45). Such literature begins the work of risk-​ridden de-​identification and de-​hierarchization, because it often leads this work to the point of desubjectivization, where it delegitimizes the space even with regard to the construction of democratic subjectivizations. Literary equality achieves a level at which it simultaneously ruins the oligarchic hierarchies and the dimension of equality of political democracy. This is why the quest for a simple principle of correspondence or opposition between literature and democracy is destined to fail.67

No writing project guarantees the establishment of “literary democracy.” There is no maxim defining the correlation between literature and politics. However, we can reconstruct the emergence of the stage on which this convergence became possible.

Regimes of Art Artistic practices cannot be separated from the discourses that enable their perception as art. Rancière refers to a specific, historically variable type of relation between the production and practice of art, forms of visibility of these practices, and their conceptual framing as regimes of art. A regime defines the ways of functioning and describing artifacts, the adopted models of creation and reception. Among the three regimes distinguished by Rancière, the first one –​dominant in antiquity –​is called ethical. In the ethical regime art does not exist as a separate field of experience, and the artistic object is not recognized as such. People do not ask about the value of artifacts but about their origin, namely their relation to what they represent, and about their purpose, meaning what they can be used for. Poetry, painting, and music have the status of crafts, judged by their

67 J. Rancière, F. Noudelmann, “La communauté comme dissentiment,” Rue Descartes 42/​2003, p. 96. Fr. “Mais elle porte ce point de désubjectivation où il délégitime l’espace même de construction subjectivations démocratiques. L’égalité littéraire atteint un ruine à la fois les hiérarchies oligarchiques et le plan d’égalité de politique. C’est pourquoi la recherche d’un principe simple de correspondance ou d’opposition entre littérature et démocratie politique. C’est pourquoi la recherche d’un principe simple de correspondance ou d’opposition entre littérature et démocratie est vouée à l’échec”.

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usefulness to the community (POA 20; AD 28). As Gabriel Rockhill writes, at the heart of the ethical regime lies “the origin and telos of imagery in relationship to the ethos of the community.”68 Art becomes a distinct field of activity in the representational regime, which follows the principle of mimesis defined after Aristotle as an effective way of imitating actions and characters.69 Imitations are both verified and protected from judgments about their truthfulness. They are verified by reference not to an ideal model but principles of art and particular genres. The principles of representation define belonging to a field of art and regulate what can be shown or said and what exceeds the boundaries of what is expressible and appropriate. Normativity of the representational regime reveals in the very separation of the representable and the non-​representable, the correspondence of specific genres to themes, and the shaping of imitation rules following principles of probability. The order of representation–​simultaneously the order of relations between the expressible and the sensible –​assigns to the word the role of revealing and showing, but it does so at the cost of a double blockage. On the one hand, it inhibits the word’s power that reveals feelings and desires but cannot speak for itself. On the other hand, this order obstructs the power of the visible, which reveals itself under the authority of the word and which cannot contain anything that resists the power of language (AU 17–​18). Thus, the representational regime does not establish formal laws but a rationality that regulates the relations between words and actions, which follows four principles. The principle of fictionality states that a poem is not a poem as a metrically regular utterance but as a representation of acting characters whose fictionality must be accepted as such (a principle rejected by Don Quixote). According to the principle of genre, fiction does not manifest itself as such but is subject to genre, and what defines a genre is not a set of formal principles but the nature of the represented. There are noble and common characters, great and small deeds, and appropriate imitation techniques: A fiction belongs to a genre. A genre is defined by the subject represented. The subject takes its place in a scale of values that defines the hierarchy of genres. … There is no generic system without a hierarchy of genres. Determined by the subject represented, the genre defines the specific mode of its representation (MS 45).

68 G. Rockhill, “Editor’s Introduction,” in: J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and ed. G. Rockhill, London: Continuum 2004, p. xiv. 69 Aristotle, Poetics, p. 19.

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The principle of genre implies the third principle, namely that of appropriateness, which aligns elocutio with fiction, serving to establish a harmonious relationship between the author, the character, and the audience. Appropriateness is related to the principle of actuality, which establishes the primacy of the word as action. Nevertheless, there is no conflict with the first principle; actuality is the place in which surfaces the system’s dual economy:  the autonomy of fiction  –​ whose task remains to imitate and please  –​is suspended in favor of another order. Mimesis is standardized through the scene of another word, the “real” scene of the oratorical word: the system of poetic fiction functions under the authority of the ideal of “effective speech” that educates minds, saves souls, defends the innocent, and moralizes soldiers (MS 48). The art of storytelling follows the art of living in society. In Tel Quel, Paul Valéry expresses similar intuitions: “For a very long time the human voice was basic to all literature. This presence of the voice explains the earliest literature out of which classical literature built up its form and its admirable temperament.”70 Moreover, we may say that the belles-​lettres system is based on classical rhetorical taxonomy, in which inventio regulates the choice of subject, dispositio –​ its structuring, and elocutio –​appropriate ornamentation. The revolution identified with Romanticism was the liberation of elocutio from the supremacy of dispositio and inventio. While representational poetry was made of stories subject to the principles of binding, characters subject to the principles of probability, and discourses subject to principles of appropriateness, the Romantic poem reversed the whole system and installed four new principles: primacy of language, anti-​genre equality of subjects, indifference of style to the represented subject, abandonment of the living word model in favor of the writing (MS 50). Roland Barthes writes about the primacy of language and the discovery of the sentence in New Critical Essays: Confronting the freedom of language, rhetoric had constructed a system of surveillance.... this system granted the writer a slight freedom by limiting his choices. This rhetorical code –​or secondary code, since it transforms the freedoms of language into constraints of expression –​grows moribund by the middle of the nineteenth century; rhetoric withdraws and in a sense exposes the fundamental linguistic unit, the sentence. This new object –​in which the writer’s freedom is henceforth directly invested –​Flaubert discovers with anguish.71

70 P. Valéry, “Odds and Ends,” in: P. Valéry, Collected Works, Vol. 14, Analects, trans. S. Gilbert, Princeton University Press 1970, p. 99. 71 R. Barthes, “Flaubert and the Sentence,” in: R. Barthes, New Critical Essays, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang 1980, pp. 77–​78.

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Thus, the Romantic novelty was primarily anti-​Aristotelian in character: lyricism detached from plot and became a matter of the direct presence of thought in the sensible; arranging fiction separated from arranging action, as held the previous convention, and became the composition of silent and literal signs. The demarcation line between the real and the fictional was blurred (ME 90–​91). We consider here processes that were slow enough to remain unnoticed, and yet when they penetrated popular consciousness during the Romantic period, they caused the absolutization of literature as the domain of the spirit subject only to the indifference of form to its own content (as opposed to representational poetics), elevating poetry as a specific mode of language (as opposed to poetry as fiction; MS 34–​37). The aesthetic revolution that occurred in the nineteenth century is not unrelated to the development of democracy, meaning politics. The aesthetic revolution was a turn that should be described in terms of a paradigm shift:72 a shift from the representational regime to the aesthetic regime and a transformation of the belles-​lettres system into the system of literature. Thomas Kuhn analyzes the course of scientific revolution along the lines of anomaly –​crisis –​ extraordinary research –​paradigm shift (scientific revolution) –​establishment of a new “normal science.” Initiated with the discovery of incongruence between the inherited regime of art and the experience of modern world, the course of the aesthetic revolution fits Kuhn’s model, and it culminated in the establishment of a new aesthetic paradigm. Moreover, the analogies extend to the famous thesis of ontological relativism: “Paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research-​engagement differently. … We may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.”73 In the case of literature, there is also a change of “instruments,” meaning a redefinition of the basic parameters of the work. As the “new instruments” of literature allow authors to register new areas of reality, there slowly consolidates a norm or aesthetic regime.

72 However, we should keep in mind that the aesthetic regime coexists with the two previous ways of art’s functioning, and in a sense, the regime even needs these ways as reference points for its specific procedures. See M. Plot, The Aesthetico-​Political: The Question of Democracy in Merleau-​Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière, New York: Bloomsbury 2014, p. 10; B. Aspe, “Les bords du temps,” Europe 1097–​1098/​2020; B. Aspe, Jacques Rancière –​Andreï Platnov, p. 33. 73 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1996, p. 111. See also H. Sankey, “Kuhn’s Ontological Relativism,” Science and Education 9/​2000.

A Positive Contradiction

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A Positive Contradiction The aesthetic regime separates art objects by their belonging to a specific mode of visibility. Artworks no longer have a specific purpose defined by the communal telos (as in the ethical regime) nor a specific addressee or subject correlated with the form of presentation (as in the representational regime). The aesthetic regime proclaims the equality of represented subjects and objects, which are indifferently dispositional, while the regime “asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself ” (POA 19). Behold the “positive contradiction” of literature in the aesthetic regime:  it destroys the norms and principles of mimesis, seeks to surpass its own limitations, and blurs the distinctions between types of artistic practice –​all this to “enter the order of life” (A 13). However, to preserve its identity and maintain the aesthetic regime that enables all these transgressions, literature simultaneously defines itself as a strongly distinguished field of “different perception,” as an autonomous area in which the distribution of the sensible has its specific principles. We should note that this contradiction functions on a completely different level than the opposition of autonomy and engagement (an apparent opposition, torn apart by this deep contradiction). Art is always “social” and “political,” which means that even if art focuses on itself, it remains an expression of society, namely how words embrace the world. At the same time, art remains “autonomous,” a place without a clear contour, in which appear various manifestations of poeticity (MS 64). It is a contradiction forgotten in late modernity (the very concept of “modernity” seeks to forget this contradiction), yet one perfectly familiar to the Romantics. Since the publication of Germaine de Staël’s On Literature Considered in its Relationship to Social Institutions, an oeuvre appears not just as an emanation of its creator’s personality but also of supra-​individual phenomena, namely national culture, the historical moment, and social elements. However, the presence of this unconscious genius, who speaks through the mouth of the poet was recognized even earlier. Herder describes the role of the “place, time, and the fullness of external circumstances,”74 of the unique local cultural milieu, ways of being, thinking, and acting that inevitably leave their mark on the work. Even

74 It is a phrase taken from a discussion of Shakespeare: J. G. Herder, Shakespeare, trans. Gregory Moore, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008, p. 29.

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earlier, in  The New Science, Giambattista Vico discovers “true Homer” who is “a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their history in song,”75 proving that Homer was an emanation of the national spirit of the Achaeans, meaning that “the Greek peoples were themselves Homer.”76 Thus, Vico negates the Aristotelian image of the poet as inventor of plots and creator of characters, images, and rhymes. The four gifts of the poet turned out to be the characteristics of language itself, the brilliant poems became a testimony to judgments and customs of an era. The Romantics developed these reflections in the terminological field into categories of “literature,” “culture,” and “nation,” while simultaneously claiming rights for individual genius. As Rancière writes: “Romantic genius is that of an individual only insofar as it is also that of a place, a time, a people, a history. Literature is the accomplishment of the non-​normative power of poeticity only insofar as it is also the “expression of society” (MS 69). Moreover, an oeuvre does not only express a particular moment of a historical cycle but also influences its time. “A people makes a poem, a poem makes a people” (MS 69) –​this phrase immediately appears in two absolutized forms. Some search in old poems for a faithful image of the people who created them, others dream of a new poem for the people of the future. Reduction to a trope or imprint versus the utopia of poetic fiat. On the one hand, de Staël and Taine, on the other hand Hölderlin and Schelling. In 1830s, Gautier fights against “l’art social,” three decades later Taine identifies the history of English literature with the physiology of the people, at the turn of the century, Lanson imposes the biographical method in the republican school curricula, while in the second half of the twentieth century, Sartre and Bourdieu demystify the creator’s freedom as derived from class position (MS 69–​70). This is how the dispute continues through centuries about this reversible formula with alternately absolutized elements. Meanwhile, the constitutive element for the aesthetic regime is only antinomy. It makes no sense to juxtapose the literary absolute and the awareness of literature’s conditioning, the solitary genius of the individual and the genius of the people: it is an internal contradiction incessantly regulated by literature. Gabriel Rockhill accuses Rancière of never investigating the causes of the aesthetic revolution, never asking why it began at the end of the eighteenth century. Rancière has his reasons, among which two are the most important: (1) following Foucault, Rancière avoids searching for roots and sources; (2) he keeps at bay

75 G.  Vico, The New Science, trans. T. Goddar, M. H. Fisch, New York: Cornell University Press 1948, p. 307. 76 Vico, The New Science, p. 308.

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the transcendental project responsible for inventing the conditions of possibility that determine sets of historical practices. Nevertheless, his reflections omit changes in the public sphere.77 Rancière does not analyze the transformation of institutions or historical consciousness, although he repeats that the moment of establishing an aesthetic regime is not accidental, as it coincides with democratic revolutions in Western societies. Let us repeat, it is the moment when both the ethical meaning and genre appropriateness of an image cease to matter. Art becomes defined by its specific form of being: belonging to the sensible sphere separated from forms of everyday experience. This separation has a clear political dimension: by abolishing the hierarchy of themes and genres, art establishes an absolute equality of the visible, a democracy of objects and subjects. Thus, art rejects the divisions imposed by the authorities and builds a different sensorium than the sensorium of domination (AD 30). There is a qualitative difference between the first two regimes and the one which resulted from the aesthetic revolution. As Michaela Fišerova argues, it is not true that all three regimes equally assume the necessity of representation and only frame its parameters differently, meaning that politics should also be possible in the ethical and representational regimes.78 It is not like that because only the aesthetic revolution is strictly political and democratic. In itself, democracy does not determine any regime of expression; on the contrary, democracy abandons the logic of determination between the statement and its content. The principle of democracy is the symbolic breach with the pre-​established system of relations between bodies and words. We find the same interruption at the heart of the aesthetic revolution and at the center of the process called democracy. The “positive contradiction” of literature in the aesthetic regime combines two theses: (1) literature is a universe of mute wandering letter, signs without a valid interpretation and defined addressee; (2) literature is a wandering letter insofar as it constitutes an illegitimate community of those who should not read.79 The aesthetic revolution is a long process, whose description we find in the eponymous essay of Rancière’s Politics of Literature. Even Corneille’s audience still consisted of princes, generals, magistrates, and preachers, namely people who acted through the medium of the word. In the representational regime,

77 G. Rockhill, “Démocratie moderne et révolution esthétique,” in:  La Philosophie déplacée, pp.  336–​349. 78 M.  Fišerova, Partager le visible: Repenser Foucault, Paris: L’Harmattan 2013, p. 59. 79 H. Kollias, “Taking Sides: Jacques Rancière and Agonistic Literature” Paragraph 30.2/​ 2007, p. 89.

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writing was an orator’s act who persuaded the popular assembly: “The representational power of doing art with words was bound up with the power of a social hierarchy based on the capacity of addressing appropriate kinds of speech-​acts to appropriate kinds of audiences.”80 In Voltaire’s era, the audience of literature was simply “a number of young men and women,”81 meaning anyone, anyone at all, n’importe qui. To an even greater extent, this was also the audience that read Balzac and Flaubert. These writers entrusted themselves to an order of words deprived of master and purpose, renounced the power of an imposed message and a specific audience, developing a discourse deprived of qualities. Rancière regards this event the birth of literature, of a signification regime in which meaning is no more a relationship between an acting will and another will but a relationship between signs and other signs.82 These considerations align with the findings of historians of writing and sociologists of literature. Modern understanding of the term “literature” was established around 1800. Earlier, literature meant humanistic refinement and good taste –​which has survived in the French lettré –​meaning membership in the intellectual aristocracy. The antonym of “literature” was le public, a pejorative term for the mass and the vulgar. In the nineteenth-​century, what gained in importance with the redefinition of the word literature –​henceforth not owned but practiced –​was “the public.”83 Rancière conducts analyses analogous to those of historians and sociologists, yet with different, far-​reaching conclusions. The first one concerns the egalitarian dimension of the above-​mentioned shifts, the second one –​the related semiological turn. In his debut work, Roland Barthes tries to describe the turn as a transition to “writing degree zero.” He argues that while being transparent and operating with a depthless sign, classical art partly begins to grow cloudy and powerful. As a result, literature is no longer felt as a socially privileged mode of transaction, but as a language having body and hidden depths, existing both as dream and menace. This is important: literary form may henceforth elicit those existential feelings lying at the heart of any object: a sense of strangeness or familiarity, disgust or indulgence, utility or murder.84

8 0 J. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance 33/​2004, p. 14. 81 Voltaire, “Commentaires sur Corneille,” in: Voltaire, The Complete Works, Vol. 55, Oxford 1975, pp. 830–​831. 82 Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” p. 16. 83 R. Escarpit, “La Définition du terme “littérature,” in: Le Littéraire et le social. Éléments pour une sociologie de la littérature, ed. R. Escarpit, Paris: Flammarion 1970, pp.  265–​266. 84 R.  Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers, C. Smith, New York: Hill and Wang 1970, pp. 3–​4.

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Since then, literature assumes new responsibilities and the task of deciphering the signs written on things. Literature becomes the domain of the “mute word.”

Mute Word Shortly after the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert faced trial, accused of ”offending public and religious morals and good manners.” During the trial, prosecutor Pinard criticized Madame Bovary’s “lewd color,” vulgar nature of love scenes, and alleged mockery of religion in the protagonist’s death scene. However, the most painful for the royal prosecutor was that all respected social institutions were equally ridiculed, and only adultery escaped any criticism.85 The acquittal was supposedly the result of behind-​the-​scenes efforts of the writer’s influential friends that were, understandably, never mentioned in the justification. Instead, the document includes an argument referring to work ethic: that Madame Bovary is a work on which Flaubert worked “long and hard.” This was a symptom of a new legitimization processes. Roland Barthes writes: Around 1850, Literature begins to face a problem of self-​justification; it is now on the point of seeking alibis for itself; and precisely because the shadow of a doubt begins to be cast on its usage, a whole class of writers anxious to assume to the full the responsibility of their tradition is about to put the work-​value of writing in place of its usage value. Writing is now to be saved not by virtue of what it exists for, but thanks to the work it has cost.86

The panel of judges from 1857 embraced this argumentation to exonerate Flaubert from the charge of deliberate attack on public morals. At the same time, the trial participants failed to notice something else, namely that the actual reason for indignation was not the scandalous moral content but the equality of themes, the monochromatic, undifferentiated presentation of the social world, and the specific style freed from evaluative elements. After all, Balzac had already published a similar novelistic study in 1831: A Woman of Thirty. In fact, the subtitle of Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners evidently signals Flaubert’s tribute to Balzac’s oeuvre. The stake in this struggle was the subversive idea that “all subjects are indifferently good or bad depending on the treatment they receive,” as Flaubert read from letter he then received from Charles Baudelaire, whose own trial began a few months later.87 85 R.  Lis, Ręka Flauberta, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic! 2011, pp. 185–​186. 86 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pp.  62–​63. 87 “Madame Bovary par Gustave Flaubert,” L’Artiste 18.10.1857. As in: F. Brown. Flaubert: A Biography, New York: Little, Brown and Co. 2007, p. 332.

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Prosecutor Pinard did not understand the proper reasons for this accusation, but he still noticed more than the novel’s protagonist. As Rancière writes, Emma is separated from the writer by the impossibility of seeing that duality. Emma lags behind the recounting of her story. She can perceive only the interlacing of sensible events weaving “her” love. She interprets this interlacing in the classic terms of identity and causality as the story of her love for another person. She thus becomes prey to the old narrative and social logic to which the novelist opposes the power of his sentences (LT 24). This illustrates the dilemma of new literature suspended between two functions:  the discovery of the world of perception and the necessity to construct action. Such literature must bridge the impersonal energies of life and the logic of social identities and causal relations. Nineteenth-​century realism was not the culmination of the representational regime but rather a moment of rupture and an opening of the stage in the following century filled by pictorial “abstraction” and “intransitive” poetic metaphor (FPA 20). Realism sought not to reproduce facts but to make visible the ordinary reality, the vast matter of signs that conveyed the history of the era. Nineteenth-​ century realism emancipated the likeness in relation to representation, abandoned representational proportions and conventions, and introduced equality of the visible. Moreover, realism faced a side effect of this process: speech became “struck by this passivity, this inertia of the visible that comes to paralyze action and absorb meanings” (FI 126). Furthermore, description received primacy over action, depriving action of its power to make things intelligible and structure the matter of the sensible. “Atomic micrology … [or] aesthetics of equal intensities, affixed to hierarchies of the representational tradition” (ETP 346),88 was an artistic novelty, but it also paralyzed the powers of creating actions and making moral judgments. In a way, literature found itself in the shoes of Marlowe, who after returning from Congo, is confronted by Kurz’s fiancée without sufficient strength to disappoint her desire for meaning (“something –​something –​to –​ to live with”).89 Of course, Marlowe is lying, while Conrad tells the truth about lying, namely that we stubbornly stick to plot patterns and subordinate “the truth of sensible moments” to “the false tyranny of stories” (LT 47). From now on, the plot is sometimes staged as a comedy of errors or exists in a heavily reduced, substitute form. The great modernists were accused that

88 Fr. “Micrologie atomique/​esthétique des intensités égales, apposée aux hiérarchies de la tradition représentative.” 89 J.  Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, New York: Dover Publications 1990, p. 71.

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their novels lacked structure, that they were spineless monsters. We can see in this accusation a relic radiation of the Platonic model of the word burdened with a definite sense, calculated for effect, and identical with action. Plato contrasts the living word of speaker or tragic hero with the silent logos of writing. In Phaedrus (275e), Socrates says that rhetoric is “a kind of skilful leading of the soul by means of words” and clearly points out the dangers of writing, which he compares to painting: Yes, because there’s something odd about writing, Phaedrus, which makes it exactly like painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence. It’s the same with written words: you might think they were speaking as if they had some intelligence, but if you want an explanation of any of the things they’re saying and you ask them about it, they just go on and on for ever giving the same single piece of information. Once any account has been written down, you e find it all over the place, hobnobbing with completely inappropriate people no less than with those who understand it, and completely failing to know who it should and shouldn’t talk to. And faced with rudeness and unfair abuse it always needs its father to come to its assistance, since it is incapable of defending or helping itself.

Writing is subject to depreciation as a perversion of living speech, introducing a disjunction between the truth of the soul and its expression. However, Rancière’s analysis of this motif of Platonic philosophy does not lead him –​as in Derrida’s case –​toward a critique of metaphysics’ logocentric roots,90 but rather toward a reflection on how the sensible is distributed. Writing is the most important deregulation of the non-​egalitarian distribution of the French sensible, meaning both the sensible and the senseful. As a result, the message falls into wrong hands, thus destroying the hierarchy of high and low spirits, opening in the world a dimension of possibilities, meaning change. The regime of the wandering word fulfills the model of the writing: the regime founds a community of equals based on the text’s unregulated and common availability. Therefore, literature ceases to be the expression of emotions or thoughts, the transcription of reality or its translation, instead becoming the domain of the “mute word” in its double understanding. First, literature becomes the eloquence of what is mute by discovering the ability to show the signs written on bodies and things, by restoring them to language through decryption and transcription. Writers become akin to a geologists or archaeologists who allow the mute witnesses of a shared history to speak. They travel through the labyrinths of the

90 J.  Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, London: The Athlone Press 1981, pp. 95–​117.

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social and individual worlds, bending over remains, collecting traces, rewriting signs, and revealing mysteries of a civilization or an era. They are not only hermeneutists but also doctors or symptomatologists, “delving into the dark underside or the unconscious of a society to decipher the messages engraved in the very flesh of ordinary things” (DOP 127). Writerly activity has a hermeneutic and healing aspect:  the society becomes aware of its own secret weaknesses, gaining the ability to overcome them. Whereas in the other understanding, the mute word is –​on the contrary –​ “the stubborn muteness” of things (POA 15), a dull expression of nameless phenomena that resist all meaning (AU 41). Like scientists discovering an anomaly on the verge of theory and experience, writers seek to devise their own way to break through molar structures and get closer to molecular multiplicity. They explore and describe this “community of measureless chaos,” which is lined with individual and social differences. However, this does not mean that literature becomes an “art of chaos,” a staging of directionless struggles of forces on the surface of language that oppose the world of legible forms.91 Because of the mute word’s duality, literary language wanders continually between the poles of under-​and over-​meaning, seeking “to reach the power of moments of suspension between incident and non-​incident, word and mute, sense and senselessness, and to transcribe them in two forms: the stupidity of the lack of sense and the madness of the excess of sense.”92 We may see it clearly in Madame Bovary, which shows diagnostic, debunking, poetic, and revelatory dimensions. Flaubert simultaneously constructs his work on the meta-​and sub-​level, avoiding engagement with the main stakes of the social and literary fields. Thus, Flaubert develops Balzac’s project of “social studies” –​the original title of The Human Comedy –​while avoiding Balzac’s inclination for typologies of social species, what Henry James calls “social botanizing.”93 Flaubert considers himself a rebellious sociologist, able to achieve an external position, to free himself from social obligations, and to reveal unpleasant truths kept silent by the masses. Moreover, he shows us the Janus face of the writer in the aesthetic regime. On the one hand: an archeologist, a hermeneutic,

91 Cf. M. Pierssens, Savoirs à l’œuvre. Essais d’épistémocritique, Villeneuve-​d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion 1990. 92 J. Rancière, The Edges of Fiction, trans. S. Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity 2020, p. 135. 93 H. James, “Honore de Balzac,” in: James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, New York: Library of America 1984, p. 37.

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a decryptor of social hieroglyphs, a doctor. On the other hand: an artist who in a revelatory mode wishes to reveal the world’s unpreparedness, the atoms’ eternal fluctuation, the molecular multiplicity. By combining these two perspectives, we gain insight into a new model of subjectivity, by which we are not ourselves, because we are shaped by social and cultural determinations, but also because, as subjects, we constantly create ourselves in the intervals between names. We function within in the realm of the sensible, in which the sensual and the senseful were specified by police procedures, while social institutions and routine naturalized this status quo. Nevertheless, we are forcefully taken from this “natural destiny” by words, disembodied entities that happen to be instruments of change, because they allow us to reconfigure the space of the sensible. Literature and politics operate in a sphere in which concepts can be stolen, in which metaphors and new representations disturb the order of the visible, the expressible, and the performable. In this sense, the story of Emma Bovary is akin to attempts made by emancipated workers to reconstruct their daily experience out of the words of the romantic heroes who suffer from not having “anything to do in society,” or those made by revolutionaries to formulate the new equality in words borrowed from ancient rhetoric or from the evangelical text (LT 16).

Emma’s life illustrates the power of “the multiplicity of these ‘silent revolts’” (LT 16), while the novel in which it is encapsulated founds a new regime of word –​along with other breakthrough works of the era –​revealing the consubstantiality of literature, democracy, and politics.

Democratic Form It is no coincidence that the decisive role in this revolutionary transformation belongs to the novel, the “genre of what is genreless” that emerged on the ruins of the belles-​lettres system. The genre was part of a low heritage, restored in a series of transformations and revindications (MT 84). Rancière traces the genre’s evolution in close relation to the state of politics and the dynamics of emancipatory processes; he draws lines of continuity from Balzac and Flaubert through Conrad and Zola to Proust and Virginia Woolf. Rancière provides no systematic lecture on the theory of the novel, but we do find many polemical comments on secondary literature. Once again, it is in dispute that Rancière’s original idea surfaces. To reconstruct it, we must enumerate the most important controversies.

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Above all, Rancière enters the debate on the novel’s genealogy. He rejects the “deep” narratives that derive novel from older genres,94 opting instead for radical novelty. Rancière claims that Cervantes and Sterne wrote works that eluded all codifications in the poetics of their time, as this hitherto marginal genre stole the limelight in its time precisely because of the aesthetic rupture. Moreover, Rancière rejects other attempts to root the novelistic genre in cultural tradition, significantly exemplified by his polemics with Erich Auerbach.95 Auerbach did much to link novelistic realism  –​understood as a technique for depicting everyday life events –​with “objective seriousness”96 and the Judeo-​ Christian tradition of describing dramatic events from the lives of simple people. In the first chapter of Mimesis, Auerbach juxtaposes the Homeric description of Odysseus’ scar from the nineteenth song of the Iliad with the biblical Elohist’s story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Auerbach indicates the differences in style (richness vs. simplicity, detail vs. restraint), narration (digressions and spatial-​ temporal specification vs. focus on plot climaxes), and character (flat vs. multi-​ layered) to argue that the religious intention of portraying ethical and spiritual processes entails a claim to historic truth, thus departing from legend as the basis of the epic and moving closer to history, namely the complex representation of the people in motion. The departure from Homeric “domestic realism” toward a fuller representation of the domestic and everyday sphere would thus be achieved through the egalitarian poetics of the Bible. Auerbach describes a similar process in the second chapter of Mimesis, in which he juxtaposes “Dinner with Trimalchio” from Petronius’s Satyricon with the Gospel of Mark. Petronius’s novel is to reach the limits of ancient realism by accurately portraying the social milieu but it does not offer “serious literary

94 It was Henryk Markiewicz who classified theories of the novel according to their depth/​ shallowness (depending on how far into the past they reached) and their breadth/​narrowness (depending on their geographical scope). H. Markiewicz, Teorie powieści za granicą. Od początków do schyłku XX wieku, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN 1995, pp.  373–​381. 95 See A. Parker, “Impossible Speech Acts: Jacques Rancière’s Erich Auerbach,” in: Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. G. Rockhill, P. Watts, Durham: Duke University Press 2009, pp. 249–​257. 96 “Objective seriousness,” as Auerbach puts it in relation to Madame Bovary, is a seriousness “which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved.” E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1953, p. 639.

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treatment of People and its life,”97 while the biblical story of Peter’s denial shows “the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people,”98 bringing to life the image of historical forces in their active influence and approximating the historical concrete. Thus, the Gospel of Mark must operate in a mixed style and take the form unagreeable with the genre system of the era. The features listed above coincide with Rancière’s characteristics of the novel, so the alleged biblical genealogy raises even stronger objection. Rancière observes that in the case of the Gospels, objects of imitation are not individually experienced incidents but foretold events whose reality is anticipated by biblical prehistory. The characters appearing in the New Testament have their Old Testament prefigurations; the “realistic” power of the salvation narrative is a function of a specific representation economy (FW 75). On the other hand, Auerbach omits the textual mise en scène:  the narrative game so insightfully described by Frank Kermode in Genesis of Secrecy. Therefore, Auerbach must conceal the text’s rhetorical power: the numerous assertions that the text originates in eyewitness testimony, the realist strategies for authenticating the message by citing historical data and imitating the realities of the era, the techniques for shaping unique situations, and skillfully applied effects of reality such as introducing an apparent contingency that reinforces the impression that we are dealing with a true story.99 This allows Auerbach to ignore the fact that the Gospel of Mark is not an eyewitness account, that it testifies to something else entirely, namely the Gospel scenario’s realization (FW 77). The historical newness of the novel could have formed many centuries later, when the art of the word abandoned representation rules, denied the logic of action, and entrusted itself to the logic of the writing (l’écirture)  –​so different from the theological and plot necessities of the Bible! Meanwhile, the entire past acquired the status of a storage full of material for adaptation. Since then, heritage of past centuries, symbols, and great mythological narratives were universally accessible and free for interpretation; treated selectively and capriciously, they appeared on the same level as the world’s banalities, history’s hieroglyphs, society’s secret ciphers, and “naked realities brought to life by the new-​found splendor of the insignificant.”100 In other words, the novel contributed to the pluralization and dialogization of dominant

97 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 92. 98 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 28. 99 F.  Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1979, pp. 102–​106. 100 J. Rancière, Film Fables, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2016, p. 9.

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worldviews, along with the more egalitarian distribution of voice. The novel’s literary heterology is inseparably intertwined with the dialogicity of democratic politics. The way Rancière thinks about literature seems to converge in many places with Bakhtin’s conception –​whose proximity calls for a separate commentary101 –​ albeit we find here plenty of differences as well. The first one concerns the already mentioned question of the novel’s origin as a genre. Bakhtin describes the novel as the only living genre of our era, unprepared, strongly vital, self-​critical, “three-​ dimensional in style” (open to the multilingualism of the world), parodying other genres, and remaining in touch with the present. Thusly described, the novel is to oppose the archaic epic, instead stemming from ancient seriocomic genres like the pamphlet, the Menippean satire, and Lucian-​type dialogs.102 On the other hand, Rancière finds no trustworthy genealogy of the novel. Regardless of whether they reach back to the Greek romance, the chivalric romance, the pseudo-​historical Baroque romance, The Golden Ass, or Rabelais –​all these roots are false. Bakhtin explores the longue durée of cultural archaics encoded in the novel, namely the spirit of carnival along with its spirit of “seriousness-​laughter,” its inversions and openness to the multilingual reality of the people.103 Rancière repeats that the novel is not simply a “low” genre like comedy –​to which some reduce the novel –​and that the novel’s peculiarity prevents the precise tracking of its roots to any forgotten tradition. Thus, the novel is a revolutionary new way of writing, an anarchic modus scribendi built on the assumption that no medium of expression is more adequate than another. What is at stake in the novel is not the appreciation of the Material Bodily Lower Stratum but the liberation of sensibility, the opening of perception, imagination, and thought to new fields of experience. The condition of possibility for the novel’s formation is the establishment of the topography of écriture’s “insular” community; an abstract space of democracy, intersected by the power of commonly available words such as “people,” “equality,” or “freedom;” a power capable of seducing individuals and

101 We may find the first draft of such a commentary in Marie de Gandt’s short text “Subjectivation politique et énonciation littéraire,” Labirynthe 17.1/​2004. 102 M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in: M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Bahktin, trans. C. Emerson, M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press 1981, pp.  21–​22. 103 M.  Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson, Minneapolis–​ London: University of Minnesota Press 1984.

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throwing them on the paths of dreams, vagrancy, poverty, suicide, crime  –​in short: freedom (FW 104). Moreover, Bakhtin studies decentralization processes of the verbal-​ideological world in the dialogic confrontation of different languages. Contrary to Auerbach, Bakhtin is not interested in the mixing of styles but in the merging of different social languages and the fusion of different groups’ ideological spectra. For him, dialog is an element of social and political change that violates the rigid order of consecrated language. Originally carnival, the novel is to be the domain of “the dual tone of speech,” which becomes a tool for destabilizing the official worldview, relativizing recognized truths, and disidentifying individuals, as illustrated by the phenomenon of “dual-​bodied” characters like Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa.104 Thus, the novel is where the dialogical element surfaces –​ as Julia Kristeva adds in Semeiotiké –​and where the European thought heads in order to turn into another form of thought, one based on conversation, the logic of distance, relation, analogy, and non-​excluding opposition.105 In Mésentente, Rancière argues that the element of politics and literature is biphony or poliphony, and even that to a much greater extent than in the ideal situation of first-​and second-​person dialog (M 90), the politics’ dialogicity originates in literary heterology, in its characteristic strategies of stealing and reversing utterances or the interplay of first and third person. However, Rancière could not be farther from a vision of the authorities’ struggle with the element of people’s speech. Bakhtin repeats that the official word combats literary polyphony with its ambivalence and liberating distance, that the “forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-​ideological world” constantly try to capture the “dialogized heteroglossia” of the human environment, that the monolog of power tries to impose itself as a worldview of verbal diversity, which is the inherent state of communities.106 Such an approach subordinates Bakhtin’s thought to the hypothesis of repression, rejected by Rancière in a Foucauldian manner. Notably, Foucalt attacks the “repressive hypothesis” for confusing cause with effect: that which is to repress natural phenomena by existing before them and independently in fact 104 M.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984, pp. 415–​434. 105 J. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in: J. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine, L. S. Roudiez, ed. L.S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press 1980, p. 86. 106 M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” trans. by M. Holquist, and C. Emerson, in M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press 1981, pp. 270–​272.

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establishes the phenomena in their factuality.107 It is difficult to speak of denial or concealment of multilingual dialogicity, because it emerges and functions in conjunction with a regulated language that perpetuates distributions of the sensible. Here functions not a simple prohibition but a set of peculiar operations, such as the multiplication of influences, expansion of penetration networks, neutralization of deviations through their inclusion. Rancière refers to a more fundamental and elusive concept, which is not at all located between people and authorities but permeates the entire social body. Rancière calls it disagreement, mésentente, meaning the never-​ending search for an adequate name or representation mediated by the circulation of metaphorical expressions. It is a matter of both literature and politics because the logic of political subjectification is based on literary heterology: first, literary heterology negates the identity imposed by the other and fixed by the police logic; second, it is based on a demonstration that assumes the other’s existence; third, it always contains an impossible identification (M 89–​90). The reference to “official languages” is as much a must as it is a need because both artistic invention and political emancipation benefit from stolen, doubled, or reversed words. An important part of the argument is the problematic relationship between the novel and modernity. Let us return for a moment to the reflections of young Ortega y Gasset’s who argues that the novel is born in a distance from the universe of legends about a lost world that represent human and divine figures on the same plane. It emerges when the real is identified with the sensual, and “the present as such”108 becomes the subject of literature. Chivalric romance was to be the last emanation of the myth, but one that “retains the epic characteristics, except the belief in the reality of what is told.”109 In Don Quixote, “reality enters poetry,” and the reader observes the intensification of a characteristic conflict: “the idea or sense of each thing and its materiality trying to fit into each other.”110 This aspiration presumes the victory of one of them: the triumph of the idea, the denial of materiality, and the enchantment of the reader or the triumph of materiality, resulting in the neutralization of meaning and the reader’s disillusionment. This results directly from the discovery of the indeterminacy of meaning, meaning its independence from matter:

107 M.  Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books 1978, pp. 17–​49. 108 Ortega y Gasset, Meditations, p. 127. 109 Ortega y Gasset, Meditations, p. 130. 110 Ortega y Gasset, Meditations, p. 143.

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The inert and harsh object rejects whatever meanings we may give it; it is just there, confronting us, affirming its mute, terrible materiality in the face of all phantoms. This is what we call realism: to put things at a certain distance, place them under a light, slant them in such a way that the stress falls upon the side which slopes down toward pure materiality.111

Rancière’s conceptual game is based on the word pair sens/​sensible, which removes the idea of pure materiality: the sensible is always the senseful. Even if we agree that the sensible constitutes a level of “unclear” cognition, in which universal categories are subject to division, we must recognize that in the game of sensations happens a configuration of potential sense. In this context, we cannot agree that great nineteenth-​century epic works seek to introduce sense into the present only to observe how it melts into air. The epic works are not at all based on a mockery of human dreams and the illusory need to give meaning. They are children of their time, the age of the bourgeoisie and democracy, but not because the “nineteenth century … has beeen excessively inclined to see comedy on earth.”112 Epic is a form of writing that assumes no necessary connection between form and content: it is a space of the uprooted word, a democratic form of language that denies any orthology. We find remarks on the novel as an epic of a prosaicized world in The Flesh of Words. The Romantics claimed that this epic stages a comic contradiction between the individual forced to seek in themself the basis for action and “the external shape of situations, events, and actions,”113 as Hegel writes, namely a disenchanted world with no gods. György Lukács writes similarly that the novel is “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,” the product and most perfect expression of an epoch in which “there is no longer any spontaneous totality of being, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”114 The epic constructs the totality of life, and the novel must rediscover and reconstruct it. This is because in the modern world the bond between the totality of life and objects does appear spontaneously. In an age that still remembers the Whole, the elementary sense of the novel remains the striving for its restitution. This surfaces in the novel’s plot and

1 11 Ortega y Gasset, Meditations, p. 144. 112 Ortega y Gasset, Meditations, p. 151. 113 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. I, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988, p. 575. 114 G.  Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-​Philosophical Essay on The Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. A. Bostock, Cambridge: MIT Press 1971, p. 56.

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form: the protagonists are alienated from the outside world and in permanent search for their own essence, while the form of Romantic irony is “self-​correction of the world’s fragility.”115 In contrast to the normative and infantile epic, the novel shows a “man-​made structure.” Its objectivity boils down to the statement that “meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality.”116 Rancière and Lukács recognize the contradictions of the Romantic aesthetic principle  –​namely art’s quest for autonomy and the aestheticization of life  –​ and try to resolve them philosophically by referring to Schiller’s concept of play drive. The basic difference is that Rancière does not perceive the modern world as internally broken, he does not characterize it through the duality of the metaphysically understood fate and the lost individual, nor does he seek in literature attempts to overcome such a duality. Rancière treats the individual’s conflict with the environment as one of many metaphors of the democratic scandal: it is a substitute term for the disagreement that restructures the field of the sensible and is an inherent feature of both politics and literature. Lukács sees in Cervantes’s novel a parody of chivalric romance, meaning petrified forms that lost their transcendental reference and died: Thus the first great novel of world literature stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his soul, whose home was nowhere; when the world, released from its paradoxical anchorage in a beyond that is truly present, was abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness.117

Therefore, already at this stage should come to the fore the modern disharmony between the soul and the world; the disharmony was merely psychologized by the realist novel, making the represented world appear in an atomized or amorphous form.118 The systematization proposed by Lukács is eminently dialectical in nature: it distinguishes two opposing varieties of abstract idealism, which the didactic novel transcends and abolishes as false. In the first idealistic formula, the protagonist’s consciousness is too narrow compared to the world (Cervantes’s Don Quixote), his ideals are too abstract, lacking any contact points with social life. In the second formula, consciousness turns out to be too extensive (Flaubert’s Sentimental Education), so that the protagonist loses himself in a

115 116 117 118

Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 82. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 88. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 103. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 113.

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false, solipsistic concept of authenticity. It is only in the educational model that these two achieve a synthesis (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship):  the protagonist matures to reconcile with reality, rejecting the abstract maximalism of the previous two and overcoming alienation. Rancière argues there happens no such synthesis. From the very beginning, the novel introduces a separation and difference, opening the space of political action. This applies already to Cervantes’s work. Don Quixote does not live in an idealistic abstraction but materially and physically entrusts himself to the truth of the book. In this way, he destroys the principle of fiction maintained by the innkeeper, the landlady, and other characters subject to the guidance of common sense, he fills in the gap between the reality of sensory experiences and the domain of literary fiction: He gives his body in order to attest to the truth not of the Book but of books in general, all those books that run fatherless through the world. For the sake of all these orphan books he reenacts the “folly of the cross,” the ascetic madness of bodies exposed not just to suffering but to the absurd in order to attest to the truth of Scripture (FW 90).

The problem is that Don Quixote is not a writer but a character. By making an analogous gesture, Cervantes remains a prestidigitator who skillfully manipulates his own faith. He hides behind the testimonies’ objectivity, pretends to be a simple copyist who has lost part of the story, makes his protagonist visit a printer who distributes his story. Cervantes continually changes his relationship with the protagonist and gradually discovers this busy and vanishing character we call the narrator. The relationship between the writer-​virtuoso and the narrator-​ maniac engenders the theology of a self-​referential book that endlessly refers to itself. As Rancière’s analysis of Flaubert, Proust, and Woolf proves, the key to this theology is the position of the speaker who oscillates between the inside and the outside of the work. Don Quixote is a prelude to later versions of plots about representatives of the people possessed by passion for books and determined to lead their life at literature’s level, but it persists in the old paradigm of a sovereign work that transforms every nonsense in life into art. In Flaubert’s time, there changes the relationship between the writer and his hostage –​the passion-​driven protagonist (sacrificed in a ritual) –​and there disappears the fundamental difference between the narrator’s and the protagonist’s word, which enter the reality of writing on equal terms. In the age of literature, style “asserts its absolute difference only at the cost of making itself indiscernible from the great prose-​from the great stupidity-​of the world” (FW 93). Style frees itself from the myth of the living Logos, distances itself from the poetics of prestidigitation to recognize its power as the power of

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écriture. Language discovers its own truth, separated from any étymon, free from the specters of the source word and Adamic language. Language celebrates disinheritance as the source of freedom (from the dictates of pre-​established sense) and equality (of all language users in relation to its meaning-​making potential). The uniqueness of this approach lies in the close connection of the aesthetic revolution with the phenomena of democracy and the logic of disagreement. This philosophy speaks not about the evolution of autonomous literary forms, because the regimes of art function in historical distributions of the sensible, which hold the power to legitimize or delegitimize existing social orders. In this context, the novel received a special role: The classical generic system was founded on the division into the high and the low, on the fact that there are forms of literature that are suitable for great events, for great people, for noble sentiments, and forms of literature that are suitable for ordinary people, and for ordinary situations, which encapsulates the opposition of tragedy-​comedy. Literature ruins this hierarchy, and it accomplishes itself essentially through the promotion of a novel. The novel was always a form of literature in which there was no necessary relation between the form and the content, where characters and registers mix. It was the space of words free from any anchorage, free from any rooting. In this sense, we can say that the novel is a democratic form of language, which denies any regulated situation of language, characterized by a defined relation between a type of social actor and a type of social receiver (ETP 142).

The novel takes the place of the epic poem as “uprooted” and “genreless,” which remains a vivid sign of the times in which the syntax of monarchical subordination disappears in favor of the parataxis of democratic coordination (NoH 99–​100). To understand the novel’s role well, we must go beyond the theory of reflection and beyond symptomatology. Literature is not just a diagnosis or symptom; it reveals its productive power and creates its own politics. If the novel reveals a multiplicity of languages –​ways of being and thinking –​it obviously portrays the society of excitement, but in the same move, it simultaneously creates this society; the novel delegitimizes previous prescriptions, revealing in a revelatory mode the poeticity qua historicity of the world and projecting new identity modes. The novel’s technical innovations such as style indirect libre and its amorphousness become a voice of equality and an instrument of emancipation.119 119 “Style indirect libre offers visibility to anything whatsoever, thereby canceling the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate speakers, making it a radically egalitarian democratic style. The novel emerges contemporaneously with the modern democratic revolutions and collaborates in what Rancière imagines as their shared amorphous

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The above is a network of relations that needs clarification. For this to happen, we must first actively forget certain terms in the vocabulary of modern humanities, especially the notions of modernity (modernism) and postmodernity (postmodernism).

False Historicizations As we know, the trouble with modernity begins at the level of establishing chronology, which Stephen Toulmin summarizes as follows: Some people date the origin of modernity to the year 1436 with Gutenberg’s adoption of moveable type; some to A.D. 1520, and Luther’s rebellion against Church authority; others to 1648, and the end of the Thirty Years’ War; others to the American or French Revolution of 1776 or 1781; while modern times stan for a few only in 1895, with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and the rise of “modernism” in the fine arts and literature. How we ourselves are to feel about the prospects of Modernity –​depends on what we see as the heart and core of the “modern.”120

We owe the popular understanding of modernity as an epochal paradigm to the classics of sociology like Max Weber. They emphasize the role of the disenchantment process, which resulted in the West entering the path toward rationalization, development of empirical sciences, art’s growing autonomy, disintegration of religious images of the world, and emergence of the model of secular culture. The classics of sociology like Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead also indicate the processes of disintegration of traditional forms of life: reflection on tradition, universalization of norms of action, and generalization of values, popularization of abstract patterns of socialization and individualization.121 In various ways, their followers separate the phenomena of social modernization from the phenomena of cultural modernity, which allows them to consider culture in terms of its adaptive function, serving to tame the unleashed antinomies. This is how Marshall Berman examines the dialectic of modernization and modernism. In the first step, he uncovers the relentless mechanics

form: each iteration of a novel is in excess of any formal definition of what a novel must be, just like each iteration of a demos is in excess of any general definition of a people.” D. Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments, Durham: Duke University Press 2018, pp.  64–​65. 120 S.  Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992, p. 5. 1 21 J.  Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity 1987, p. 2.

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of civilizational and social processes:  industrialization and urbanization, migration, the development of capitalist markets and communication systems, the power of nation-​states and the rise of mass social movements. In the second step, he analyzes the dominant cultural model of an era in terms of its usefulness in achieving control over contradictions.122 Toulmin separates that which Berman tries to connect:  he challenges the standard image of modernity related to the rationalization of scientific research and the transfer of the image of the universe into the practical sphere, meaning organizing the new European system of states, built around absolute claims to nationhood.123 At the root of the image of modernity, Toulmin discovers a conservative counter-​revolution that thwarted the free spirit of sixteenth-​century humanists, namely the Renaissance interest in the physiology, practical problems of medicine, law, and morality, drawing inspiration from ethnography, geography, and history rather than mathematics. This allows Toulmin to construct an analogy between the seventeenth and the twentieth century –​equally subjected to alienation, intellectual solipsism, and emotional narcissism  –​and to search for the rationale for a new rebirth. Montaigne’s world of political moderation and human tolerance began to return in the belle époque, and around 1910 it was almost ready for restoration. Unfortunately, it was discarded due to two martial paroxysms, and we had to wait until the 1960s for the return of humanism, namely the reintegration of humanity with nature, a restoration of respect for Eros and the emotions, a relaxation of the traditional antagonism of classes, races, and gender, an acceptance of pluralism in sciences.124 I juxtapose these concepts to emphasize their deep similarity, which is much deeper than the highlighted differences in the modeling of historical matter. They are both eminently theological, because they present history as a series of cumulative changes, and they are postulative, because at their point of arrival, they call for the reestablishment of an optimal state of dialectical balance between modernization and modernism (Berman) or for the renewal of the forgotten legacy of modernity that enables the acceptance of otherness and the establishment of racial, class, and gender equality (Toulmin). According to Rancière, such projects construct sovereign signifiers and establish them at the heart of the epoch to subordinate to a single sense the co-​presence of different temporalities (ETP  208–​209).

122 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, pp. 15–​36. 123 Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p. 96. 124 Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p. 159.

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Interestingly, the same holds true for the undertakers of modernity, meaning the philosophers who claim that its cognitive and emancipatory promise cannot be saved. We find a model form of such a discourse in Jean-​François Lyotard’s writings. According to Lyotard, we have abandoned both the science’s claims to hold objective truth and the faith in progress. The great stories that describe our place in the world and history have given way to an irreducible heterogeneity of language games. We abandoned not only speculative and freedom metanarratives but also any longing for them, and we are content with the legitimation of the world’s image provided by our own communicative interactions. Old beliefs were replaced by sober realism and Musil’s “science smiling into its beard.”125 We can easily notice in these considerations a narration scheme about the liberating power of lost illusions. To legitimize it, Lyotard must build a strong diachrony and clearly mark on the moment of catastrophe, meaning a breakthrough. Of course, it is the Holocaust. The destruction of the modern project happened in the age of the furnaces, and Auschwitz remains the paradigmatic name for this liquidation.126 Such concepts are based on a traditional theology of Time, oriented around a central event that introduces a turning point in History, divides it into the time before and the time after. Their relative novelty lies in the fact that they turn the radicalism of political emancipation inside out, transforming it into a reflection on radical Evil: “In the ethical turn, that orientation of times was reversed. History is no more cut by the promise of a revolution ahead of us; it is cut by the event of Extermination that lies behind us, an event which stands for the endless disaster, debarring any process of emancipation” (FPA 23). Time becomes an instrument of division into the possible and the impossible and a measure of the proper ways of thinking and acting. A similar danger surfaces from diagnoses of radically transformed modernity, be it “liquid” (Zygmunt Bauman) or “reflexive” (Ulrich Beck). As writes Anthony Giddens, the theoretician of “radicalized modernity,” the diagnoses assume a moment of recognition of internal contradictions: here is an era “coming to understand itself,”127 learns the etiology of its illness and treats itself.

125 J.-​F.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington, B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984, p. 41. 126 J.-​F.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained:  Correspondence 1982–​1985, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1992, p. 18. 127 A.  Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity 1990, p. 48.

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Rancière’s apparent reluctance to think in terms of time stems from his conviction that it inevitably contains a normative component and makes us blind to the potentiality of change hidden in the present. It is not without reason that time –​the operator of prohibition (“it is not the time yet”) and adjuration (“one must act for the sake of the future”)  –​is at the center of the idea of progress and at the heart of the revolutionary promise. When they are reversed, time does not change its function at all, except that it blocks all emancipation and restrains political imagination (“let us not repeat these mistakes, we know how it ends”). Rancière prefers to think in terms of space. For him, democracy is first and foremost an “operation on space:” through overlays or “extensors” (espaceurs), existing terms like people, nation, proletariat, or citizen move away from their original context and gain political meaning, sometimes becoming new identifying factors (identifieurs), but as such, they are prone to further redefinition based on changes in scope, displacement, insertion of a gap, or spacing.128 The emancipatory processes described in  La Nuit des proletaires or  Hatred of Democracy are not part of a timeless project but a spatial model of negotiation and division. The model involves an inclination to cartographic metaphors; the map illustrates the arrangement of material elements rather than the sequence of events; at the expense of causal relationships, it exposes a network of complex and equal relations; it defines the scene, abandoning the illusion of sources. According to this topic, politics and art “draft maps of the visible” (POA 35), showing existing boundaries, but also allowing for corrections and creating potential worlds. The critique of the concept of modernity mostly focuses on the historical model that conceals the transformations of art and literature and disallows thinking of aesthetics and politics together. After all, what is the modernity that arbitrarily sweeps together such figures as Hölderlin, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Malevich, or Duchamp into a vast whirlwind where Cartesian science gets mixed up with revolutionary parricide, the age of the masses with Romantic irrationalism, the ban on representation with the techniques of mechanized reproduction, the Kantian sublime with the Freudian primal scene, the flight of the gods with the extermination of the Jews in Europe (POA 5).

This impractical term’s analysis reveals its implications. Rancière foregrounds the cultural dimension of modernity:  theories of artistic modernism and the avant-​garde, popular fairy tales about the growing autonomy of art, which are

128 Rancière, F. Noudelmann, “La communauté comme dissentiment,” p. 94-​95.

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to abandon all ties and obligations to explore their own possibilities. It turns out that modernism’s and postmodernism’s apologists describe modernity in the same categories: as a break with representation and orientation toward possibilities of the medium. They propose different descriptions and position value marks differently, but they agree on the diagnosis: the new era appeared when painting moved into the domain of abstraction, with the development of “intransitive” poetry and atonal music. The works of Malevich, Mallarmé, or Schönberg are to testify to the historical shift, meaning the abandonment of anecdote and fixation on form. We may recognize in this approach a teleological reflection about art by which “intransitivity” culminates centuries of art evolution. However, we may also notice a universalization of the aesthetic autonomy theme, while art’s aesthetic autonomy is another name for its heteronomy. Abstract painting does not so much explore surface and stain as it expresses a vision of man located in new structures and surrounded by new objects: “planarity of the surface of depicted signs … intervened as the principle behind an art’s formal revolution at the same time as the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience” (POA 12). To characterize literary modernity as intransitive language has its political implications visible in a recurring dilemma. Either we oppose the autonomy of speech to the political word –​understood as the instrumentalization of literature –​or we authoritatively assert the unity of intransitive literary expression and materialist revolutionary practice. In the latter case, modern art remains a substitute for revolutionary fulfillment. Vision of modernism as the domain of independent art was created by Marxists not by accident. They wanted to prove that even if the hope for social revolution is lost, art preserves the purity of rupture. Adorno and Greenberg define art’s radicalism by the radicalism of its separation, as they uncouple politics and art to sustain art’s political potential. “Modernity” and “modernism” serve as instruments to pacify art’s internal contradiction, allowing for art’s aesthetic identification to be absolutized without its forms of disidentification within which the former grows. “Modernity” and “modernism” emphasize autonomy and forget heteronomy, which is its other name. This extremely vital dogma influences the interpretation of all kinds of transformations in the artistic field of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the collapse of innovative art that resisted all forms of market commodification is associated with the end of modernity. In general, the concepts of modernity and postmodernity falsely project on temporal succession the antagonistic elements whose clash gives life to art’s entire aesthetic order. This order has always drawn strength from the tensions between contradictions. The autonomy of aesthetic experience accompanies here

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the elimination of all pragmatic criteria that separate the domain of art from non-​art, the solitude of an oeuvre from forms of collective life. There is no postmodern rupture, there is only the dialectic of the “politically apolitical” oeuvre (AD 42) known to the art and literature of the last two centuries. Postmodernism understands art’s disidentification as the collapse of modernity, while [t]he blurring of the borders between high and low art –​and ultimately between art and non-​art –​is not the exclusive character of our present. It does not mean the end of “modernity.” On the contrary, it is in line with a process of border-​crossing that went along with the whole development of the aesthetic regime of art (FPA 21).

In this perspective, postmodernism, was simply the name under whose guise certain artists and thinkers realized what modernism had been: a desperate attempt to establish a “distinctive feature of art.” by linking it to a simple teleology of historical evolution and rupture. There was not really a need, moreover, to make this late recognition of a fundamental fact of the aesthetic regime of the arts into an actual temporal break, the real end of a historical period (POA 23).

Thus, there happens a simple error: processes of arts’ autonomization and political emancipation were first equated, thus forgetting the contradictory nature of the aesthetic regime of art, so when this contradiction came to light, it was interpreted in terms of a fall of modernity (FPA 21). The commentators who maintain Rancière writes in the vein of postmodern critique of modernity –​because he rejects the specificity of medium as a determinant of modern art and undermines the privilege assigned to “the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy”129 –​ seem to miss the consequences of this powerful conceptual demolition. Rancière defines postmodernism directly as “l’attitude désabusée,” a cynical attitude,130 according to which everything is equivalent and equal, subject only to the laws of the market. Rancière constructs his theory on a strong polemical counter, as he simultaneously disassembles two simplifying historicizations, two symmetrical narrations, similarly unidirectional, albeit one emphasizes development and the other –​decline. In a thusly cleared field, Rancière describes the peculiarity of the aesthetic regime of art with its internal contradiction, stemming from the fact that art is simultaneously a specific sphere of experience, a part of life, and an element of social praxis. Instead of diagnosing epochal breaks and applying

129 T. Ross, “Departures from Postmodern Doctrine in Jacques Rancière’s Account of the Politics of Artistic Modernity,” Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture 19/​2011. 130 M. Rousset, “L’Art politique est-​il réactionnaire? Entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Regards 58/​2009. Fr. “L’attitude désabusée.”

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great schemes of progress or regress, we should study signs of continuity in art’s topography, sustain the recognition of contradictions, and practice an archaeology of the tensions it creates. Instead of adopting Sartre’s strategy  –​namely operating with the opposition of intransitive poetic language and transitive prose speech, which is faithful to communication norms and retains political influence –​we should keep in mind the incompatibility of the two principles of anti-​representational poetics founded on the ruins of the representational regime: one decrees the indifference of form to the subject while the other defines literature through a specific use of language (MS 86). Rancière consistently challenges the legitimacy of modern art by ascribing it to the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy, but his actions show no signs of the postmodern “anything goes” He sustains the conviction that both progressive discourses of modernity and postmodern attempts to surpass them are misguided, one-​sided interpretations of the contradictions of the aesthetic regime, which makes art an autonomous form of life while positioning this autonomy inside the process of life’s self-​organization.

The Aesthetic Unconscious The aesthetic revolution outlined the field in which develop art and literature by drawing vitality from a deep and irremovable contradiction. From the same field emerged the most important discourses of modern humanities: philosophy of suspicion, social sciences, depth psychology. All of them are involved in a significant paradox: they spoke the truth about the mystifications of art, forgetting that they employ the critical procedures art developed. Therefore, Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism is to owe its existence to the Romantic poetics of decrypting ordinary objects, which become like hieroglyphs. The Kulturkritik discourse that supposedly speaks the truth about the deep (social, political) sense of art draws its procedures from the very domain it attempts to expose, namely the “epistemological face of Romantic poetics,” “the gaze of dis-​enchanted reason” cast on its creations (DOP 127). Rancière brings this forgotten debt to light by totaling its components, in the following quote in relation to the social sciences: Taking the power of speaking away from the speakers to give it back to mute things, leaving the old theatrical stage of the conflicts of ends and means in order to disclose the hidden depths of the self and of society, reading on the very body of mute objects the ciphered meaning of an age, a history or a society –​all that was the invention of literature (FPA 17).

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In The Aesthetic Unconscious, Rancière offers a more extensive analysis of these correlations, albeit limited to the birth of psychoanalysis, which is based on two texts by Freud: Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva and Moses and Monotheism. As is well known, Freud likes to use literary figures. However, they do not serve him as indifferent material for illustrative purposes to demonstrate the operability of concepts. Art and literature are to testify to the deep rationality of fantasy. Together with the developing psychology, artworks are to prove that the apparent lack of meaning can disguise a deeper meaning and that an insignificant detail can hide concealed thoughts. Moreover, artworks shape the specific relationship between thinking and non-​thinking:  thought penetrates sensory materiality, and conscious thinking contains the irrational moment. However, Freud’s theory is born both as continuation and negation of the “aesthetic unconscious,” an invention of art and literature in the aesthetic regime. On the one hand, artistic “unconscious thought” created the possibility for establishing psychoanalysis, while on the other hand, it became the subject of corrections and polemical interventions. What are the relations of convergence and conflict between the aesthetic and the Freudian unconscious? The revolution dating back to Vico and his discovery of “true Homer” –​which triumphs in the Romanticism and the establishment of the model of écriture –​stems from the discovery of “thought that does not think:” the mute word written on bodies and things transformed into traces and fossils. The writer-​archaeologist or writer-​geologist deciphers these signs according to Novalis’s maxim: “everything speaks.” This is the root of the great Freudian principle that there are no high and low subjects, no insignificant details, that each fragment conveys an image of the whole and truth reveals itself in the detail. The writer is a symptomatologist to the same extent that a psychoanalyst is a writer. Freud reveals the paradoxical condition of his hermeneutics: for the banal to disclose its secret, it must be mythologized. Against positivist scientism, Freud attempts to renew the alliance with popular beliefs and myths. He shows that the space between positive science and the matter of myths and fairy tales is not empty, that it has for a long time been the domain of the aesthetic unconscious. Writers learned what scholars ignored: “the importance and rationality proper to this phantasmatic component,” which science treats as a chimera or reduces to simple physiological factors (AU 48). However, poets and writers are only partly allies, as the former’s work in domain of the unconscious is marked by ambiguity, argues Freud.131 As we remember, the aesthetic unconscious provides a double

131 “Story-​tellers are valuable allies … Would that this partisanship of literary workers for

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scene of the mute word: one inscribed on things and bodies, demanding a deciphering, and the other being a deaf expression of forces that linger on the verge of consciousness, resisting all meaning. Freud sets the foundations of his theory in times of an extensive counter-​movement in the aesthetic regime, whose protagonists are Schopenhauer, the young Nietzsche, Zola, Maupassant, Ibsen, and Strindberg. They all explore the “non-​thought inhabiting thought,” the anonymous forces of naked life which –​in agreement with Maeterlinck’s metaphor –​ resemble the Stranger at the threshold, knocking on the door that cannot be opened (AU 40–​41). Writers do not emphasize the rationality of dreams enough, they show the movement of dreams but do not communicate clearly enough the importance of their meaning. This is a moment of significant correction. Freud chooses the first form of the mute word against the second one. He focuses on traces and symptoms, ignoring the anonymous voice of the unclear and the senseless. He chooses the method of detail and constructs a paradigm of searching for hidden causes. Each detail appears as a trace that must be forced to speak, rather than as an imprint of reality, a footprint of an inarticulate force, tearing apart the logic of action and taking space on the work’s surface. As Georges Didi-​Huberman argues, this option will become a subject of revindication for art historians who fight against the perception of painting as a coded text, hidden treasure, or a body in the closet.132 Therefore, Freud must fund the organizing fantasy and discover in the analyzed works the repressed fears attributed to the author. He follows the need to identify the real person behind the play of imagination and biographizes fiction. This approach certainly repeats not the common accusation that Freud demystifies the subtleties of art and establishes its sexual etiology, reducing it to an economy of desires and revealing the small secret hidden in the great myth. Rancière argues that there are certain polemical stakes behind the reduction of fictional data to pathological reality. It is an intervention in the domain of the aesthetic unconscious. The point is to bring order to the relations of knowledge and non-​knowledge, the real and the fantastic, with which literature plays the senseful nature of dreams were only more unequivocal!” S. Freud, Delusion and Dream, trans. H. M. Downey, New York: Moffard, Yard and Company 1922, p. 36. 132 “The picture is always considered as a coded text, and the code, like hidden treasure or a body in the closet, is always waiting there, somehow behind the painting –​ and not within its thickness –​to be found: this will be the “solution” of the painting, its “motive” and its “confession.” G. Didi-​Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning The Ends of a Certain History of art, trans. J. Goodman, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2005, pp. 231–​232.

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carelessly. If oscillation between two poles of mute speech is typical of the aesthetic unconscious, then the Freudian unconscious is marked with a preference for the hermeneutic tendency. The psychoanalyst extracts figures created in the aesthetic regime and brings them back to the representational regime.133 He chooses triumph of logos over pathos (AU 78); he wants to strengthen the ego at the expense of the id134 while literature sustains a constant circulation between thinking and non-​thinking, the senseful and the senseless. Overall, all suspicious twentieth-​century thought was dedicated to demystifying the naivety of literature and uncovering its unconscious discourse. It treated fiction in terms of an involuntary symptom or cipher coding precisely the principles of social structure, class struggle, the market of symbolic goods, or the structure of the literary field. However, the explicative models this thought created originated in literature itself, especially in the perception of prosaic reality as a silent guardian of hidden truths. Literature itself created patterns of thinking later used for its critical disassembly and demystification. Albeit literature waited not for her own critics, as it made itself the object of own diagnoses and revisions, willingly turning its own symptomatic technique against “the abundance of signs and decipherings”135 (P 33). In this sense, literature in the aesthetic regime started not only a new mode of perception but also a new kind of reflection on the sensibleness of the world and literature itself. *** The regime that enabled the foundation of the literature we know today made the novel into a tool of intervention in the existing distributions of the sensible. Thus, it is not only that the novel reminds us of Penelope who –​in Milan Kundera’s famous metaphor –​“undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before.”136 It is not just that the novel is a medium of doubting reflection, that it serves to dismantle the narratives that unify and stabilize the image of the world. Indeed, the novel

133 See O. Krochmalný, “Estetyczny rodowód nieświado mości: Rancière i Freud,” Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne 1.3/​2013, p. 14; S. M. Guénoun, “Jacques Rancière’s Freudian Cause,” SubStance 33.1/​2004, pp.  25–​47. 134 According to the maxim: “where id was, there ego shall be.” S. Freud, „New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-​Analysis and Other Works (1932–​1936),” in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey et al., Vol. XXII, London: Hogarth Press 1964, p. 80. 135 Fr. “la profusion des signes et de déchiffrements.” 136 M.  Kundera, The Art of Novel, trans. L. Asher, New York: Grove 1988, p. 117.

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can do this, too, but the extraordinary power of this democratic form lies in its ability to interfere in the collective aisthesis. Emma Bovary remains the heroine of her time. She does not weave or rip the tapestry but quite simply “darns the stocking...” And when she does that, a draught of air from under the door stirs a little dust on the flagstones. The writer seeks to weave this impression into the matter of the representation, to store it in a dense web of signs. Thus, he actively joins in the process of slicing the world.

II Slicing the World When I lived in Naples, there was a beggar at the door of my mansion to whom I threw a few coins before getting into the car. One day, surprised never to get any thanks, I took a look at the beggar. Now that I was looking, I saw that what I had mistaken for a beggar was a wooden box painted green that contained red soil and some half-​rotten bananas. –​Max Jacob, “The Beggar of Naples”

The Beggar of Naples In a poetry volume entitled The Dice Cup (1916), we find an intriguing piece that I have used above as the motto for this chapter.137 Its author is Max Jacob, the legendary poet and painter of the beginning of the twentieth century, Picasso and Apollinaire’s friend, member of the Montmartre bohemia. Jacob worked during a great artistic revolution, marked by such events as Apollinaire’s debut (1913), the Dada Manifesto (1916), and the appearance of the surrealists (Breton’s first manifesto in 1924). However, despite this situational and epochal anchoring, literary historians find it troubling to situate Jacob on the map of twentieth-​century literature. In fact, Jacob remains a marginal, eccentric, and even anachronic figure that remains difficult to unambiguously situate, a figure associated with the main currents of the great avant-​garde only by the logic of precursorism and inspiration. On the biographical level, this eccentricity is confirmed by thousands of anecdotes138 and numerous attempts to define the sources of Jacob’s otherness: Jewish origins, fondness for the Kabbalah, alleged homosexuality. His spiritual biography abounds in breakthroughs, among which the most important one is his conversion to Catholicism in 1914; Jacob persisted in his faith until his tragic death at the hands of the Gestapo in 1944. As the Polish poet Adam Ważyk puts it, “Jacob never fully fit anywhere. Neither his personality nor oeuvre submitted to a particular formula. A buffoon and a mystic, a Jew

137 M.  Jacob, The Dice Cup, trans. M. Rosenthal, New York: Legible Books 2019, p. 117. 138 See R. Guiette, La Vie de Max Jacob, Paris: Nizet 1976.

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and a Catholic, a cubist and a bit of a Romantic,” a Dadaist and a metaphysician, a decadent and an artistic innovator.139 Modern studies of Jacob celebrate the contradictions as well, drawing an image of an artist who “plays hide-​and-​seek with his readers and with himself,” a classic of modern religious poetry,140 a titan of avant-​garde modernism, or a postmodernist who questions any depth, constancy, and identity.141 Interpretations of The Dice Cup abound in terms that tame this literary oddity. They frequently refer to absurdity, grotesque, metamorphosis, a mix of lyricism and irony, horror and joke, oneirism, daydream, pun, linguistic invention, and wordplay. It is difficult for commentators to abandon ordering schemes, so they repeatedly link Jacob’s oeuvre with artistic programs of poetic cubism,142 dadaism,143 and surrealism. Scholars often consider The Dice Cup along with Apollinaire’s Onirocritique as the most important signal of the “convulsive beauty” revolution, an early realization of écriture automatique. Some indicate the ennoblement of the marginal form of the prose poem, a hybrid lyric genre that abandons the rigors of verse form, exposing poetic qualities of language itself; this tradition dates back to Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose. The rich genological reflection about the prose poem is dominated by endocentric studies (the evolution of autonomous poetic forms), but there are also exocentric approaches that present the clash of various literary discourses as an image of real social, class, and gender conflicts.144 In the preface to The Dice Cup, Jacob notes that true poetry should be free in form yet simultaneously defined in character and mood. This new form of writing is to break with temporal and spatial coherence to use the aesthetics of dislocation and exile (dépaysement), surprise, humor, and fantasy, seeking to evade realist restrictions. However, this does not mean the form operates in the domain of pure phantasmagoria, as Jacob declares: “A work of art has a specific

139 A. Ważyk, “Max Jacob, czyli poszukiwanie tożsamości,” in: M. Jacob, Poematy prozą, pp.  399–​400. 140 Ch. van Rogger-​Andréucci, Max Jacob: acrobate absolu, Seyssel: Editions Champ Vallon 1993, p. 15. 141 S.  Lévy, The Play of the Text: Max Jacob’s “Cornets à dés,” Wisconsin and London: University of Wisconsin. Press 1981. 142 G.  Kamber, Max Jacob and Poetics of Cubism, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1971. 143 A. J. Davies, Max Jacob and the Poetics of Play, London: Legenda 2011, p. 2. 144 J.  Monroe, A  Poverty of Objects:  The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, New York: Cornell University Press 1987, p. 117 ff.

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value, independent of any confrontation with reality.”145 However, the first two miniatures are entitled “1914,” while the third –​“War.” Hence, it seems that these independent works of poetic imagination respond to an epochal cataclysm, working through the greatest trauma of the generation to which Jacob belonged. It seems as if two imperatives were meeting here:  that of activating imagination’s free play and that of representing a generational experience. The mission of new literature gains clarity at the intersection of these two impulses, which Jacob attempts to define it in the later Art Poétique: “In the prose poem, … the subject does not have importance and the picturesque either. One is concerned only with the poem itself, namely with the harmony of words and images and their mutual and constant appeal.”146 A poem creates an autonomous reality and abides by its laws. However, its matter consists of words and images, inevitably referring to the world, containing its sensory correlates. Thanks to various transformations, shifts, and juxtapositions of these verbal-​pictorial elements, there happen two simultaneous processes:  liberation from customary images of the world petrified in fixed structures of signification and the transformation of this world through the introduction of new distributions of the sensible. Autonomous art turns out to be essentially heteronomous, and its autonomy appears as a paradoxical condition of heteronomy. As I have explained above, this is a paradox characteristic of the entire aesthetic regime, already available in the writings of Friedrich Schiller. “The Beggar of Naples” develops a theme of a mistake that is both amusing and uncanny: a Neapolitan aristocrat realizes that, for some time, he had been mistaking a pot of rotten bananas for a beggar, dropping small donations into this pot of soil. Thus, the actual theme of the piece is the exit from the misconception that operated –​literally –​based on blindness. What was the basis of the mistake? At first, we could say: inattention. A routine perception of reality that makes us absent (even if only partially). Habitual, schematic perception becomes like a mistake. However, using literary devices, art retrieves us from these automatic habits. As Victor Shklovsky writes in his famous article, automatization “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and fear of war,” while poetry works on the principle of “weirdness,” its “unfamiliar, incorrect” form de-​automatizing

145 M.  Jacob, Le Cornet à dés, Paris: Éditions Gallimard 2003, p. 24. 146 M.  Jacob, Art Poétique, Paris: Emile Paul frères 1995, p. 66. Fr. “[Dans] Le poème en prose, … le sujet n’a pas d’importance et le pittoresque non plus. On y est préoccupé que du poème lui-​même c’est-​à-​dire de l’accord des mots, des images et de leur appel mutuel et constant.”

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our relationship with the world and with other people.147 However, such an approach relies on a double arbitrary assumption. On the one hand, it assumes the inevitable routinization and grammaticalization of our everyday cognitive and expressive acts, which function not only as a powerful alienating force but a gigantic shredder: “And so life is reckoned as nothing.”148 On the other hand, it presupposes the necessary ruthless innovation of literature, which blocks this shredder and suddenly restores us to the sensory world. In the approach proposed by Rancière, literature is not a set of devices but one of the social practices that actively transform the lifeworld. In its functioning, literature may resemble politics because it can change the parameters of our sensorium and displace distributions of the sensible and the senseful. Thus, Rancière moves away from the complementary assumptions indicated above. First, this process need not happen through a weird and unfamiliar form; the imperative of novelty and originality becomes muted. Second, literature often succumbs to the force of all kinds of (perceptual, mental, linguistic) inertia, while social practices and human relations are the domain of poiesis. In other words, petrifying (police) tendencies clash with renewing (political) impulses. This dialectic results in many indirect combinations: emancipatory political action can give birth to strictly police art, while seemingly old-​fashioned and conservative literature can hide liberating power. The aristocrat from Max Jacob’s text must confront the absence of the beggar, her existence was only the aristocrat’s projection, a derivative of the mechanical division of the social body according to the criteria of class, wealth, gender, the schemes of distribution of places and roles. Consequently, the aristocrat confronts the disturbing presence of an object, namely the yellow wooden box that suddenly materializes in the place abandoned by the phantom figure. The revelation of this object could reveal the Absurd, meaning the arbitrariness of our cognitive categories and the groundlessness of being, perfectly indifferent to all cognitive efforts, as in the case of the famous plane tree, whose unreachable being-​in-​itself was contemplated by the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea. However, this revelation, this evasion of routine can also provide the impetus to revise an unreflective worldview governed by the police logic of properties, places, and functions once and for all agreed upon. This is an event that in its elementary form resembles a “political moment.” The aristocrat simultaneously experiences

147 V.  Shklovsky, Art as Technique, London and New York: Longman 1988, p. 20. 148 Shklovsky, Art as Technique, p. 20.

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a revelation about the poverty of his gaze and the power of the sensible, capable of bringing to life an infinite wealth of forms and senses. The above interpretation uses the vocabulary developed by Rancière in his aesthetic writings. Before we return to Max Jacob’s piece, let us clarify a few terms from this vocabulary in a steady pace.

Sensible One of the most important concepts in Rancière’s philosophical vocabulary remains “distribution of the sensible.” It means “dividing-​up of the world” the selective segregation of perceptual data through which the visibility of individuals and social groups is established. Thus constructed system of perceptible certainties simultaneously makes the existence of the divisions and the common visible (DOP 36; POA 12). However, before addressing the dynamics of distribution itself, we need to carefully the scope of the term “sensible.” Rancière emphasizes that his proposed notion of the sensible stems from Kantian aesthetics. In this matter, all shifts and corrections are as important as similarities. They disallow establishing a broad definition of aesthetics as a reflection on what is sensual and senseful. Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic power of judgment seeks to investigate the a priori conditions of valuing. The matter occupies a special place in Kant’s philosophical system. Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason describe the first two “powers of the soul:” the theoretical logic operates with a priori categories and organizes sensory data; the practical logic establishes moral law through regulative ideas and directs individual behavior. Critique of Judgment projects an intermediary link between these instances, a power similar in its characteristics to both types of reason and one significantly different from both. Lyotard compares the link to a shipowner who sails between archipelagos of two cognitive powers, enabling trade, communication, and warfare. It has no territory for themself, they require only a medium (the sea) and the freedom of movement.149 Thus, what is the judgment of taste? It is a judgment which is responsible for evaluating, shaping the subject’s attitude toward experienced phenomena, and managing feelings of displeasure and pleasure: liking, delectation, interplay of feelings and thoughts, seeing purpose in the world. However, it does not make

149 J.-​F.  Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press 1988, pp. 153–​154.

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judgments about properties of things and as such is not a cognitive judgment. We cannot discuss it because, first, it does not use concepts and is not equipped to obtain them, and second, it is based on purely subjective grounds. At the same time, it does not influence the subject’s activity, which distinguishes it from power of morals. The judgment of taste is a purely contemplative judgment, meaning “a judgement which is indifferent as to the existence of an object, and only decides how its character stands with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure.”150 It operates in a space of double suspension: of cognitive judgments and moral precepts. Another name for this suspension is disinterestedness: “Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful.”151 However, disinterestedness does not mean aimlessness. The play of imagination, on which the power of judgment is based, refers to purposefulness, which is not directed toward some practical goal but is a principle of harmonious combination of elements, of fortuitous alignment of formal qualities. Beauty is “the form of purposiveness in an object, so far as this is perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.”152 This “purposiveness without an end”153 (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck) characterizes artworks and poetry, which suspend descriptive and prescriptive discourses by projecting their internal teleology of form. They play with delusion without misleading because they overtly present themselves as a play of imagination. They do not seek to deceive the intellect with a sensual visualizing representation but allow it to be used for specific and independent purposes. These motifs of Kant’s analysis of the power of judgment –​the autonomy of taste from cognition and morality, its disinterestedness and contemplativeness –​ are sometimes appropriated in various ways by great generalizations. First of all, scholars eagerly state that Kant’s Critique of Judgment legitimizes the autonomy of art, that Kant and his heirs deny all “cognitive or moral” functions to art, meaning they question its role in learning about reality and shaping life attitudes, thus undermining the principle of mimesis and reducing artistic practices to a game.154 Some theorists155 even put a sign of equality between sovereignty and 150 I.  Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Maredith, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, p. 41. 151 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 42. 152 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 66. 153 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 204. 154 Z. Kuderowicz, Kant, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna 2000, p. 110. 155 W. Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, Nottingham: Sage Publications 1997.

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self-​reference:  art frees itself from moral obligations and equates beauty with uselessness so that it now has an aim in itself. Art gains freedom yet condemns itself to progressive alienation because it becomes increasingly difficult to receive. After Kant, aesthetics devotes itself to the constant justification of art’s distinctiveness, in a way providing it with public relations services, like an advertising agency. Those who point to the historical limitations of this aesthetics aid the critics who present Kant as the legislator of art’s autonomy. For example, Arnold Berleant156 argues that Critique of Judgment remains a document of the Western epistemological tradition that privileges uninvolved contemplation of a discrete object. Kant is to transfer this model from the grounds of the theory of cognition to reflections on art, and in doing so, he disrupted the natural experience of art, which is engaged –​meaning actively influencing the viewer’s attitude –​and integrated with the full range of individual and cultural experience. In the new era, in the face of modern art’s transformations, Kant’s aesthetics is just an academic anachronism that must be replaced by a different way of thinking about art, one that emphasizes openness of perception, somatic participation, the role of the viewer, the resonance of associations and memories. Such approach is based on projecting thought patterns and misrecognitions on the past. First, as Daniel Dumouchel suggests,157 in the context of Kant’s aesthetics we should not speak about the autonomy of the artistic field but rather about the specificity of aesthetic experience. The object of analysis is not a sovereign fragment of the social field at all but the subjective autonomy of experientiae. This experience is by nature irreducible to other experiences, but it does not constitute an independent dimension of mental dispositions. Second, the theme of the judgment of taste’s disinterestedness is misinterpreted. As we remember, taste is responsible for the alignment of the powers of the sensible (imagination) and conceptual understanding (intellect). Taste is subjective but also universally valid because of common sense that depends on the imaginary disposition and the sense of purpose. Taste does without concepts but ultimately needs them to become communicable and commonly available. Taste exists in a web of tensions and cannot be considered in isolation from moral subjectivity and social structures. Moreover, taste has a very important communitarian aspect: it marks

156 A. Berleant, Re-​Thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts, London and New York: Routledge 2005. 157 D.  Dumouchel, Kant et la Genèse de la Subjectivité Esthétique, Paris: J. Vrin 1999, pp.  8–​14.

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out the path of cultural progress toward community. Aesthetic autonomy does not serve aesthetics alone but gains its full meaning with the pedagogical and political project of the autonomy of humanity. Thus, aesthetic autonomy enables openness to relationship with the other, offers access to otherness, and broadens the field of interaction. Beauty turns out to be a plane for establishing individual freedom: “Confronted with beauty, I am freed from the influences of nature, from the necessity, obviousness, and regularities that everyday experience teaches us. As a result, I become as if unreal, introduced into a state of potentiality.”158 Kant’s aesthetics allows us to think of art and literature as transformative activities that neutralize natural-​mathematical determinations, strip reality of its illusory self-​obviousness, and opens within it a dimension of possibility. However, this happens only when the work respects the specificity of aesthetic experience that that some theorists159 associate with the sudden experience of unexpected non-​functionality. In other words, art should not directly address the problems of morality, anthropology, or the theory of cognition, because it then becomes victim to parasitic rhetoric; it should create an aesthetic appearance. Rancière does not put this in deontic terms but rather explicitly states that the autonomy of art is the autonomy of experience –​not of artwork –​as the latter enters the sensorium of autonomy insofar as it is not (entirely) a work of art. The autonomy of experience appears in a space that holds no contradiction between the autonomy of art and the promise of politics (DOP 117). The attractiveness of Kantian aesthetics relates to its ability to defuse dualistic schemes: aesthetic suspension is first and foremost suspension of any hierarchical regime. We’re no longer dealing either with the understanding that determines sensibility, or with the anarchic revolt of sensation against understanding (MOE 75).

Therefore, Kant allows us to go beyond dualisms and beyond thinking in terms of determinism. However, Rancière reads Kant in a specific way that constitutes the originality of his approach. First and foremost, Rancière rejects thinking in terms of the methodology of the separation of rational powers or the “dispute of faculties.” According to Kant, cognition stems from the intellectual and sensory core, but thinking and intuition are essentially different phenomena. Intuition

158 J. P. Hudzik, U  podstaw estetyki. Główne problemy Kantowskiej estetyki w  świetle współczesnej filozofii i kultury, Lublin: UMCS 1996, p. 200. 159 R.  Bubner, Doświadczenie estetyczne, trans. K. Krzemieniowa, Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa 2005, p. 179.

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is individual, direct, and passive, while the conceptual is general, indirect, and active (that is a product of the intellect), while cognition is a synthesis of both. Contrary to Kant, Rancière argues that human is not defined by two worlds at all –​the realm of the senses and the “moral kingdom”160 –​but coexisting sets of possibilities that things will be perceived and understood in one way or another. These possibilities pervade the realm of sensible, in which we cannot distinguish between pure perceptual data and their conceptual categorizations. Thus, the sensible is always senseful. The reinterpretation of Kant’s thought does not mean a negation of the theory of a priori forms of sensuality but many shifts and erasures. Above all, Rancière reunites what Kant separates, and in doing so, he refreshes the earlier understanding of aesthetics. In Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s foundational work from 1850, we do not see a clear distinction between perception, representation, and thought. Aesthetica begins with a paragraph with the following definition: “Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium, est gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae.”161 The components of this definition seem very heterogeneous:  liberal arts theory, lower theory of cognition, art of thinking beautifully, art of non-​rational understanding of reality analogous to thinking. They activate all the meanings of the ancient Greek αἴσθησις, which denotes sensation, sensory impression, knowledge, and cognition. This mix of matter is of great benefit to Rancière. His turn to aisthesis is positioned at the antipodes of the phenomenology of perception, which as in the writings of Mikel Dufrenne, emphasizes its role in “illuminating originary experience” (l’expérience originaire), rehabilitating the original “unsettled perception” (la perception sauvage), bringing consciousness to “original Being” (l’Être brut).162 Rancière has no weak spot for this type of speculation, and contrary to the suggestions of some exegetes, he does not propose any “ontology of multiplicity.”163 The stake of Rancière’s conceptual game is something completely

160 “But where does this lead us? To the fact that man must be destined for two entirely different worlds: for the realm of sense and understanding and so for this terrestrial world, but also for another world, which we do not know –​a moral kingdom.” I. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. J. Gregor, Norwalk: Abaris Books 1979, p. 129. 161 Aesthetica, §1. See A. G. Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik. Die grundlegenden Abschnitte der “Aesthetica” (1750–​58). Lateinisch-​Deutsch, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1983, p. 3. 162 See Mikel Dufrenne et l’esthétique: entre phénoménologie et philosophie de la nature, eds. J.-​B. Dussert, A. Jdey, Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes 2016. 163 B. Besana, “L’Ignorance du sensible,” in: La Philosophie déplacée 2006, p. 248.

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different: to retrieve perceptible experience from its hierarchical relation of subordination (to the categories of the intellect) and to discover in it the power to suspend normativized modes of experience. This explains Rancière’s intervention in the domain of aesthetics. Baumgarten places on the same level the reception and selection of stimuli, their hierarchization, and the determination of meaning. In Critique of Pure Reason (A1, fn.), Kant finds this account too broad. On the other hand, Rancière does not attempt to settle this dispute, but he instead seeks to test Kant’s precise analytics in action, so Rancière brings it into the realm encompassed by Baumgarten’s broad definition: he restores to the sensible the status of intelligible (AU 5–​6), redefining this “field of unclear representations” as the domain of different cognition. In The Flesh of Words, Rancière summarizes the debt to Kant as follows: “the dismissal of the mimesis and the abolition of the distance between the eidos of the beautiful and the spectacle of the perceptible [le sensible]; the ability of the beautiful to make itself be appreciated without concept” (FW 18). This enumeration is characteristic of the current of postwar philosophy that undertook the rehabilitation of the sensible and the affective in polemical opposition to both the idea of the over-​sensible (divine, sacred) and the natural (in accordance with human nature). Sensible experience –​as in Deleuze’s reflection –​loses its primordiality and gullibility to turn out to be formatted by knowledge, conditioned by the history of subjective confrontations with the phenomenon. At the same time, le sensible has the power to transcend conceptual frameworks; the autonomous power of beauty transforms the cognitive schemes that configure systems of perceivable phenomena. To define the communal horizon of these practices, Rancière refers to the writings of Friedrich Schiller.

The Aesthetic State Schiller wrote Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man from 1794 to 1795. He dedicated them to Prince Frederik Christian of Denmark, but in fact, he formulated a message for all of humanity in the age of the French Revolution and the deep crisis of the Enlightenment. Schiller states with characteristic emphasis that, in his time, reason has finally freed itself from illusions, that knowledge which could be used for social repair has been acquired and disseminated, and yet Europeans remain barbarians, because they refuse to accept the truth. Therefore, Schiller asks himself:  How to make the Enlightenment influence human character? And he answers: people must develop in themselves the capacity for feeling, which stimulates cognition. In this task, one will not be helped by the

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state but by fine arts. The fine arts should subject one to the power of form and make one an aesthetic person. Why? Schiller employs an anthropological argument: only culture can satisfy the human need for freedom and the play drive. Only culture can be the place for the reconciliation of contradictions because “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.”164 Culture is the place of the dialectical synthesis of the sense drive and the form drive, the place where sensory experience is imposed upon form, which in turn becomes saturated with the sensible. However, Schiller also reaches for a sociopolitical argument. Indeed, following Kant, Schiller separates from truth and good the domain of taste, distinguished by its non-​discursiveness and disinterestedness; but much more strongly than Kant, Schiller links the sense of taste –​through the concept of “aesthetic disposition” –​ with the social. It is through beauty, Schiller argues, that people become socialized. Taste establishes individual harmony, which is the basis of social harmony. The moral state can only develop from the aesthetic state.165 For art to fulfill its mission  –​epistemic stimulation, full humanity reintegration, establishment of social order –​it must remain faithful to autonomous beauty, to pure appearances (Schein). Art must abandon reality and rise above immediate needs, for it is the “daughter of freedom” and wants to obey spiritual necessity instead of following the compulsion of material need.166 By freeing itself from necessity, art saves people, who “on the wings of imagination leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future.”167 A beautiful appearance not only “expands before [man]” but also represents a step toward culture that testifies to the external and internal freedom of humanity.168 The central paradox of “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man” concerns the intentional aimlessness of art: But man possesses sovereign power only in the world of appearance, in the unsubstantial realm of imagination, only by abstaining from giving being to appearance in theory, and by giving it being in practice. It is only by being frank or disclaiming all reality, and by being independent or doing without reality, that the appearance is aesthetical. Directly

164 F. Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in: Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian, New York 1910. p. 252. 165 Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” p. 268. 166 Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” p. 211. 167 Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” p. 277. 168 Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” p. 280.

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The aesthetic state is the “unreal state of imagination,” situated between the dynamic state of power and the ethical state of law. Far from physical and moral coercion, the “impulse of form creates by degrees a third and a joyous realm, that of play and of the appearance,” in which one person meets another not on the grounds of force or duty but in play. Their fundamental right is “to give freedom through freedom.”170 It remains the domain of illusion, but it expands reality by a new dimension and, through the aesthetic human, actively influences its shape. Rancière argues that Schiller outlines the impassable horizon of the aesthetic regime. In his aesthetic state, the opposition between active understanding and passive sensible is abolished, as the social division between those who think and decide and those who are immersed in materiality is destroyed. Art becomes work directed at transforming sensual matter into self-​awareness and the sensible experience of community. Thanks to it, the activity of thought and sensory sensitivity merge into a single reality, creating a sphere of appearances that allows us to envision equality. Aesthetic education engenders people capable of living in politically free communities. Free play is the vehicle for a new form of sensual universality and equality (ME 130–​132). Far from the emancipatory pathos of Herbert Marcuse, who interprets “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man” in terms of the repression of sensuality,171 Rancière places the reinterpreted paradox of purpose without purpose at the heart of his thinking about art. Schiller inherits from Kant the distinction between appearance and reality, but he abolishes the isolation of these spheres. For Schiller, aesthetic play is neither impersonal nor disinterested; its goal remains a specific art of life. Artwork as “free appearance” escapes both the logic of representation (it is not an appearance related to the model-​reality) and the logic of the “power of reason” (it is not active form imposed on passive matter). Instead, artwork is “a sensory form, it is heterogenous to the ordinary forms of sensory experience that these dualities inform” (AD 30). Schiller proves to be an ally in the critique of “false or impure artistic appearance.” A work that subordinates the aesthetic game to certain political stakes assumes an implicit teleology:  its goal is the planned reconfiguration of the

1 69 Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” p. 286. 170 Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” p. 293. 171 Η.  Mаrсuse, Eros and Civilization: Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston: Beacon Press 1955, pp. 172–​196.

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landscape of sensible. Thus, it becomes an element of strategy, a tool for the disposal of militant energies, and it forgets the “intimate paradox of the aesthetic regime,” namely that aesthetic experience has a political effect by suspending at the outset the strategic logics that subordinates means to ends and the sensible –​ to understanding. This suspension is the prerequisite for art’s effectiveness in its mission to shape people, proving that there is no contradiction between the purity and the political of art. According to Kant, free appearance suspends the power of form over matter and intellect over the sensible. Schiller follows this thought to apply it to anthropological categories, arguing that the power of form over matter is nothing other than the power of the state over the masses or of the representatives of reason over the people of nature. Aesthetic appearance constitutes a rejection of this opposition. Let us remember that Schiller wrote “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man” soon after the Thermidorian Reaction, meaning at the time of the revolutionary idea’s final degeneration. Rancière sees this as a polemical impulse. The French Revolution degenerated into terror, because it was subject to the power of intellect, which imprinted itself with active violence on sensory materiality. Schiller is to propose to juxtapose the power of intellect with the aesthetic revolution as the formation of a community of feeling.172 Let the materiality of art announce a different configuration of community, despite the degeneration of state structures.

172 One could correct this interpretation: Schiller was not so democratic in his arguments; his thought was subject to the power of the elitist idea of the beautiful soul (schöne Seele) developed by Christian Martin Wieland. So in his last letters, Schiller tries to withdraw from his more daring statements and explicitly write that the need for beauty “like the pure ideal of the church and state can be found only in a few selected circles.” Referring to Schiller and even more to Schelling, Joseph J. Tanke, “Which Politics of Aesthetics?,” in: Distributions of the Sensible, eds. S. Durham, D. Gaonkar, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2019, p. 82, reinterprets modern aesthetics polemically against Rancière: “I see the aesthetic as a metastable phenomenon that oscillates between, on the one hand, the intimation and promise of equality, and, on the other, the division of the community of spectators and readers into those capable of grasping the true nature of the aesthetic experience and those on whom it will be lost.” As far as this argument is concerned, I take it that the peculiarly interpreted Schiller remains the philosopher’s ally in the task of abolishing the distinction between aesthetics and politics.

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The paradox presented in the fifteenth letter, that “man is only completely a man when he plays” is the foundation of two structures, the aesthetic art and the art of life: The aesthetic experience is effective inasmuch as it is the experience of that and. It grounds the autonomy of art, to the extent that it connects it to the hope of “changing life.” Matters would be easy if we could merely say –​naively -​that the beauties of art must be subtracted from any politicization, or –​knowingly –​that the alleged autonomy of art disguises its dependence upon domination. Unfortunately, this is not the case: Schiller says that the “play drive” –​Spieltrieb –​will reconstruct both the edifice of art and the edifice of life (DOP 116).

Aesthetics is the domain of sensory experience that is an autonomous form of life. However, because it is subject to the modality of promise, aesthetics contains the possibility of radicalizing one side of the equation; it carries the ideas of a pure art world and the self-​abolition of art in life, meaning its abolition as a separated practice. In other words, one can emphasize autonomy at the expense of life or, conversely, life at the expense of autonomy. Such interpretations give birth to additional configurations of aesthetics, “modern” scenarios according to which art can become life or life can become art. Attributed to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” offers a sketch of the first of these scenarios. It radicalizes Kant’s mediatory aesthetics and incorporates it into a new ontological project. The world is the creation of a free, self-​aware, and self-​creating absolute subject. As Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy write, it is a poietic process, which in its purest form may become present in the art of the word.173 This program opposes the soulless structure of the state  –​which in principle “must treat free men as mechanical gear mechanism”174 –​with the lively community. However, the latter requires an idea embodied in sensory shapes, truth, and good related to beauty. Hence, poetry should become the “teacher of mankind,” the foundation of a “new mythology” that will reign after the end of philosophy and history, taking place of the old sciences and arts, embodying the ideal of universal freedom and equality of spirits.175

173 Ph.  Lacoue-​Labarthe, J.-​L.  Nancy, LʼAbsolu littéraire. Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand, Paris: Éditions de Seuil 1978, pp. 43–​51. 174 D. F. Ferrer, Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism: Translation and Notes, Verden: Kuhn von Verden Verlag 2021, p. 22. 175 Ferrer, Oldest Systematic Program, p. 23.

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In this configuration of aesthetics, art is “a matter of inhabiting a common world,” and its forms are forms of collective education subjected to the principle of common temporality: new life needs new art (DOP 121). There is an agreement here between the aesthetic regime of the arts and the ethical regime of images: “free play” transforms into its own opposite, namely into “the activity of a conquering spirit that suppresses the autonomy of aesthetic appearance by transforming any sensible appearance into a manifestation of its own autonomy” (ME 54).176 This scenario provided the matrix for countless aesthetic and social revolutions, which sometimes united in an effort to build a new life and sought to abolish both political contention and aesthetic heterogeneity, as in the days of the Marxist and artistic avant-​garde collaborations. Moreover, the scenario was realized in a more pragmatic form by Arts and Crafts, Werkbund, and Bauhaus movements dreaming of a new community of craftsmen, by “social art” in the spirit of Josef Beuys, twentieth-​century design, urban excesses of the Situationist International, and even of the supposedly “pure” poetry of Mallarmé and his successors. All these seemingly incommensurable phenomena are linked by the radicalized politics of free form that “demands that the work realize itself, that is eliminate itself in act, that it eliminate the sensible heterogeneity which founds aesthetic promise” (AD 39). The emancipatory promise of art in the aesthetic regime has a paradoxical structure: its fulfillment brings the abolition of art as a separate sphere and its transformation into a form of life itself. In the shadow of this threat, another politics develops, the politics of resistant form, which wants to preserve its ability to change the world by evading any intervention in the present. Here it is not art that becomes a form of life but life that becomes a form of art: Egalitarian promise is enclosed in the work’s self sufficiency in its indifference to every particular political project and in its refusal to get involved in decorating the mundane world …. A contrast is thereby formed between a type of art that makes politics by eliminating itself as art and a type of art that is political on the proviso that it retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention (AD 40).

At this point, Rancière invokes –​as a kind of prototype –​Flaubert’s “indifference,” but on the extension of this line we find avant-​garde hermeticism defining the political of art as a radical disagreement with the world. The theorist of this scenario is Adorno, who seeks an alternative to capitalist mass culture. 176 Fr. “il faut aussi transformer le “libre jeu” en son contraire, en l’activité d’un esprit conquérant qui supprime l’autonomie de l’apparence esthétique, en transformant toute apparence sensible en manifestation de sa propre autonomie.”

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To distinguish himself from the consumerist measures of the market and to negate the culture industry that has cut off “people’s last possibility of experiencing themselves,”177 art should sustain a radical separation from commodified and aestheticized reality. “In this logic, the promise of emancipation is retained, but the cost of doing so entails refusing every form of reconciliation, or maintaining the gap between the dissensual form of the work and the forms of ordinary experience” (AD 41). In its extreme form, each of these scenarios entails an entropy of art, taking the form of the “ethical dissolution of aesthetic heterogenity” (AD 43). Schiller seemed to understand it, because he explicitly opted to uphold the autonomy of art as a domain of appearance, for only in this way can it sustain its emancipatory promise. As Jürgen Habermas comments on Schiller’s concept expressed in “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man”: “If, without any regard for the intrinsic meaning of the cultural sphere, one were to break open the vessels of aesthetic appearance, the contents would have to melt away –​there could be no liberating effect from desublimated sense and destructured form.”178 The tension between politics of free form (art becoming life) and politics of resistant form (life becoming art) somehow threatens the aesthetic order of art while enabling its functioning. The principle of this regime is the pendulum movement between scenarios. This is what happens in the third configuration of aesthetics, in which art and life exchange their attributes. The configuration stems from Romantic poetics and hermeneutics in their scenario of concealment and reactualization. Indeed, the third configuration includes both ordinary objects and ancient artworks in the “continuum of metamorphic forms” (DOP 125): they can be extracted from ordinary use and viewed as poetic or marked by history. The heterogeneously perceivable is everywhere, be it in art’s past –​open to reinterpretation and museal arrangement –​or in the lifeworld, as “the infinite poem” can appear as the antique store in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, a sewer in Hugo’s Les Misérables, vegetable stalls in Zola, or the surrealist objets trouvés. To construct this thought, Rancière must redefine the terms of Kantian and Schillerian analyses of beauty, but he also feels obliged to define his position in relation to other post-​Kantian aesthetic theories, especially the aesthetics of the sublime.

177 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by, E. F. N. Jephcott, London and New York: Verso 2005, p. 65. 178 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 50.

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The Sublime In Kant’s philosophical system, beauty fulfills an important mediating function. In the first two Critiques, Kant outlines a specific topography of mental powers: there are two realms (phenomenal and noumenal), which are governed by different laws (natural necessity and moral imperative), while the function of mediation can be performed by beauty, meaning that “which pleases universally without a concept.”179 The experience of the sublime is equally universal and selfless, but it involves emotion rather than contemplation, ruining this intricate construction. While beauty unites the two realms, the sublime confronts the subject with the frailty of cognitive faculties and forces it to gaze into the abyss: The feeling of the sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law. It is, in other words, for us a law (of reason), which belongs to our vocation, that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of the senses.180

The difference between the experience of beauty and the experience of the sublime is rooted in their nature. The former relates to the quality of the object and brings pleasure, while the latter relates to quantity or size and evokes mixed feelings of anxiety and satisfaction  –​or delight “brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces.”181 However, beauty mostly provides connectivity between speculative reason and practical reason, while the sublime makes us aware of the disagreement between the sensible and the noumenal, the impossibility of acquiring knowledge. “The sublime” is a “broken bridge,”182 under which gapes the abyss that separates the powers of imagination from the powers of intellect. The experience of this abyss involves the inhibition of the cognitive process and the rupture in the framework of identity. As Schiller adds,

179 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 104. 180 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 88. 181 Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp.  75–​76. 182 L. M. Brooks, “Kant’s Fractured Bridge: Breaking the Link of Identity,” in: L. M. Brooks, The Menace of the Sublime to the Individual Self: Kant, Schiller, Coleridge and the Desintegration of Romanic Identity, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen 1995, pp. 49–​67.

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this happens as a shock that tears the spirit out of “the net which feeling has spun round us.”183 The sublime represents an isolated case of radical disagreement leading to the momentary (instantaneous and temporary) bankruptcy of the knowledge system. Although the sublime is not central to the problem of the power of judgment,184 it lies at the center of many modern aesthetics. For Rancière, the most important point of reference remains Jean-​François Lyotard’s theory that advocates the crucial role of the sublime in avant-​garde and postmodern art. In Leçons sur l’Analytique du Sublime, Lyotard spectacularly promotes the category of the sublime. As a starting point, he rejects the analytics of beauty, insisting that the common sense determining the universality of the judgment of taste is a utopian assumption of Kantian aesthetics. Lyotard inscribes beauty in the idea of consensus  –​postulated rather than diagnosed  –​and contrasts it with the sublime, which presupposes an endless dispute.185 Lyotard argues that today, when beauty easily and imperceptibly transforms into kitsch, art is left with the sublime, with its inherent, untamable feelings of shock and contradiction. The hitherto goal of artistic endeavors to create artifacts to be savored turns into the goal of highlighting the differend, the primordial inadequacy of concepts and imagery. Therefore, Lyotard must reinterpret the Critique of Judgment and establish a specific diachrony of modernity and postmodernity. The specificity of Lyotard’s interpretation of Kant is most easily grasped from the play of differences. In this context, Jarosław Płuciennik enumerates the relation to nature, the relation to metaphysics, consequences for subjectivity, and different profiling of the whole concept of the sublime. Kant refuses to relate the “formless” notion of the sublime to artworks, while Lyotard considers only art. The inadequacy of imagination in contact with something greater means for Kant the existence of a supernatural element in people, while Lyotard views

183 F. Schiller, “On the Sublime,” in: Schiller, Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and the Philosophical Letters of Schiller, trans. J. Weiss. Boston: Little and Brown 1845, p. 138. 184 Some even argue it is but a marginal concept, developed late, inaccurately, and in haste. Proof of the “last-​minute nature” of the sublime in this part of the Critique may be found in proportions (after a detailed and precise analysis of the concept of beauty, Kant devotes a mere seven paragraphs to the concept of the sublime: §23–​29) and structure of argumentation (non-​conclusiveness, lack of equivalent for the mathematical/​dynamic). See H. E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, pp. 304–​307. 185 J.-​F.  Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg, Redwood City: Stanford University Press 1994, pp. 159-​190.

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it a sign of the unrepresentable. Kant’s experience of the sublime strengthens subjectivity, while for Lyotard the sublime is a tool for the deconstruction of subjectivity. Kant formulates the aesthetics of perception, while Lyotard –​the aesthetics of production.186 Thus calibrated aesthetic theory –​referring to the field of artistic production and focused on the differend and entropy –​operates with a specific vision of modern art that turns away from the usual techniques of representation to endeavor representing the unrepresentable. At this point, Lyotard must make two related gestures. First, he discredits realism by claiming it stems from anxiety and the intention “to avoid the question of reality,” that realism’s purely conventional representations are always “somewhere between academicism and kitsch,” and finally, that it remains at the service of a hegemonic power, endlessly reproducing the “correct images, the correct narratives, the correct forms” that legitimize its rule.187 In a second gesture, Lyotard must privilege the anti-​figurative and the innovative, the works “pressed forward by the aesthetics of the sublime” that “give up the imitation of models that are merely beautiful, and try out surprising, strange, shocking combination.”188 Within the sublime resides a characteristic split:  it exists in a melancholic/​ modernist and a radical/​postmodernist variety: Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not to enjoy them but to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.189

By shying from marking a transition point and constructing a chronology of these transformations, Lyotard shows the coexistence of two forms of art inspired by the sublime in modernity and postmodernity. However, by doing so, Lyotard condemns himself to arbitrary decisions, to judging which artists

186 J.  Płuciennik, Retoryka wzniosłości w dziele literackim, Kraków: TAiWPN “Universitas” 2000, pp. 131–​154, p. 149. 187 J.-​F. Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Regis Durand, in: J.-​F.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis 1984, pp.  52–​53. 188 J-​F. Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant Garde,” Paragraph 6/​1985, p. 12. 189 Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?,” p. 60.

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indulge in the melancholic pursuit of the Whole (Chirico, Malevich, or Proust) and which indulge in the joy of creating new imaginaries (Braque, Picasso, or Joyce). Thus, Lyotard reduces the complex landscape of attitudes and projects to a simple palette of choices: artists can stop searching and condemn themselves to kitsch/​academism, persist in the vicious circle of nostalgia trying to represent the unrepresentable, or renounce the longing for lost presence by accepting and thematizing the failure of imagination and turning to experiment. Of course, it is not always easy to separate disagreement for representation’s powerlessness from the joy of inventing “new rules of the game.” This causes Lyotard’s argument to gravitate in the least expected direction, namely toward Kant’s theory of genius, meaning the power to create that for which no definite rule can be given, a power that is unlimited and opposing to the spirit of imitation.190 In Lyotard’s writings, the innovative sublime derives from modern anxiety and responds to historical trauma  –​the experience of history as an unintelligent power that eludes inherited cognitive categories. If art seeks new means of artistic expression, it does so to find a form that could be imposed on the ruins of history.191 Art’s effort leads to new forms and the inevitable failure of imagination, confronting us with the ultimate failure of dreams for wholeness and order, with the catastrophe of the project of modernity –​with Auschwitz as its paradigmatic symbol. Rancière polemicizes with Lyotard’s concept of the sublime in several parallel threads.192 First, Rancière indicates a misreading of Kant’s third Critique. In Rancière’s view, the sublime does not refer to art but defines the transition from aesthetics to ethics, while the experience of disharmony between the powers of reason is to lead the subject toward a sense of harmony. Lyotard is to transfer this problematic to modern art to make the latter an “ethical witnesss to the unrepresentable” (DOP131). Thus, Rancière argues that Lyotard intends to reverse Kant’s logic. The goal of artistic actions is no longer beauty but the sublime because art has only a negative purpose, it is to testify to the existence of something that evades the power of reason. According to Lyotard’s declaration, this testimony

190 Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp. 136-​137. P. Crowther, “The Kantian Sublime, The Avant-​Garde, and the Postmodern: A Critique of Lyotard,” New Formations 7/​1989, pp.  71–​73. 191 A.  Slade, Lyotard, Beckett, Duras and the Postmodern Sublime, New York: Peter Lang 2007, p. 33. 192 S. Zepke, “Contemporary Art: Beautiful or Sublime? Kant in Rancière, Lyotard and Deleuze,” Avello Publishing Journal 1.1/​2011.

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is “the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field.”193 In turn, Rancière insists on the “beautiful semblance” because of its functionality, or in Schillerian terms, its power to form a community. Second, Rancière critiques the concept of the unrepresentable. What is it that makes a phenomenon resist all representation? One answer is the impotence of art as incapable of producing a form of sensory representation adequate to the idea. Another answer suggests the obstacle lies in the very essence of art, in the three properties of its representations:  the excess of presence that betrays the event’s singleness, the status of unreality that lessens the heaviness of existence, and the transmission model as aimed at the pleasure of reception or amusement, which does not keep with the seriousness of the event (FI 109–​110). Thus, Rancière perceives here a loss of an enduring relationship between the thing or the event and its expression. However, the alleged loss of power actually relates to the multiplication of its forms, inherent in art’s aesthetic regime, for which nothing is unrepresentable. Instead, behind the aesthetics of the sublime lies the need for something unrepresentable, the need to inscribe artworks in an “ethical detour” (DOP 132), noticeable in the aesthetic reflection on the (un)representability of the Holocaust. What is the basis of the ethics of the unrepresentable? It starts with the iconoclastic ban on making images and ends with the absolutization of artistic experimentation according to the following logic: One cannot have sublimity both in the form of the commandment prohibiting the image and in the form of an image witnessing to the prohibition. To resolve the problem, the sublime character of the commandment prohibiting the image must identified with the principle of a non-​representative art. But in order to do that, Kant’s extra-​artistic sublime has to be identified with a sublime that is defined within art (FI 132).

This procedure reveals its paradoxical nature in relation to the Holocaust, which indicts realist techniques. According to Lyotard, it can be proven either by naked witnessing or the sublime art of experiment. The latter becomes a l’art de l’imprésentable, whose existence is justified by the unrepresentable. Its elaborate procedures are techniques for resisting the imperialism of thought and remaining faithful to the experience of irreducible otherness. Rancière calls for a reversal of Adorno’s well-​known and trivialized phrase about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. Art is necessary to portray the horror of the camps

193 J.-​F.  Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity 1991, p. 137.

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because its task is to make the invisible visible and to give sensible shape to the inhuman.194 On the other hand, testimonial literature like the works of Robert Antelm or Primo Levi conveys no pure testimony; it remains the variety of literature that has developed its procedures in an aesthetic regime, such as the paratactic style developed from Flaubert to Camus, linked to no communicational failure in the face of the unnamable but to a revolution that equates the manifestations of the human and the inhuman (ETP 519). Thus, the point is to go beyond the ethical consensus of iconoclasts and idolaters, beyond the Mosaic prohibitions and injunctions formulated by the guardians of the unrepresentable like Lanzmann.195 Third, Lyotard’s aesthetics is a camouflaged mourning of emancipation. Lyotard begins from Adorno’s ideas by linking the political potential of art to its radical separation from social life and its distance from commodified culture. However, then he makes a significant turn to separate art from the promise of a non-​alienated life, burdening art with another function: that of bearing witness to the failure of the emancipatory promise, which is fulfilled in Nazi and Soviet barbarism. The dissensus that Adorno still “contradiction” turns into “catastrophe” for Lyotard (ME 130). Art becomes a form of unravelling misfortune and “mourning politics” (FPA 22). The iconoclasm of this aesthetics justified by the emancipation of the subject indeed deprives the subject of tools to transform the world. There is no question of aesthetic or political transformation where the contradiction is removed, the dispute is neutralized, the end of utopia is proclaimed, and what is established is the primacy of ethics. The reference to the Holocaust functions in this arrangement as blackmail and threat. As Žižek writes, the Holocaust reduced to an unimaginable and apolitical crime means “unthinkable apolitical excess of politics itself: it compels us to subordinate politics to some more fundamental ethics.”196 Finally, fourth, what is also distorted is the landscape of artistic practices –​ forced into a simple, orderly scheme  –​which applies both to conservative art and to art seeking innovation. As far as the avant-​garde project is concerned, its relations with social radicalism are cut. It ceases to be an artistic and political utopia directed at the transformation of collective existence and becomes a

194 J. Rancière, Figures of History, trans. J. Rose, Cambridge: Polity 2014, pp. 49–​50 195 S. M. Guénoun, “L’hyperbole spéculative de l’irreprésentable. Politiques et théologies de l’image chez Jacques Rancière,” in: Politiques de l’image. Questions pour Jacques Rancière, eds. A. Jdey, Bruxelles: Lettre volée 2013, pp. 159–​160. 196 Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” p. 73.

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“post-​utopian” radicalism of formal search. Thus redefined, to preserve its raison d’être, the avant-​garde must constantly cross the line separating it from the aestheticized commodity reality, but it must also constantly re-​denounce utopia and invalidate the revolutionary projects from which it takes origin. The avant-​garde merely proposes the formation of an ethical community that rejects any project of collective emancipation (DOP 130; AD 20). Moreover, the avant-​garde affirms art’s autonomy by strongly linking its value to separation from politics. However, this rupture occurred much earlier, namely at the beginning of the aesthetic revolution, albeit it has always coexisted with the opposing drive to transcend autonomy. A perfunctory treatment of “realist” art –​deprecated as kitsch repetition and a tool for legitimizing power  –​seems unacceptable as well. Rancière uses the term “realism” mainly in reference to the literary movement that defined itself as such. He repeatedly stresses that realism197 is not a slogan for a return to the triviality of real things but a comprehensive system of possible variations of signs and features of reality, a controlled proliferation of meanings. What we recognize today as “natural” techniques of literary representation –​like the author’s withdrawal so that her silent presence resembles divine omnipresence, the immersion of utterances and perceptual minutiae in the same regime of indeterminacy (MS 119–​122) –​was in its time a revolutionary new form of distribution of the sensible. Realism sought to program a model of relational art in which autonomy does not conflict with politicization: [Art] is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this place. Indeed, the figure I referred to above today suggests two sorts of transformation of this political function. In the aesthetics of the sublime, the space-​time of a passive encounter with ‘the heterogenous’ sets up a conflict between two different regimes of sensibility. In ‘relational’ art., the construction of an undecided and ephemeral situation enjoins a displacement of perception, a passage from the status of spectator to that of actor, and a reconfiguration of places (AD 23–​24).

This is where art and politics meet, which the aesthetics of the sublime tried to prevent. In a sense, this point of arrival was also a point of departure. Focused on thinking emancipation through art, Rancière rejects the idea of the unrepresentable.198 Furthermore, Rancière rejects overly expressive polarizations,

1 97 Or “high realism,” in J. Rancière, Figures of History, p. 81. 198 J. L. Déotte, Qu’est-​ce qu’un appareil? Benjamin, Lyotard, Rancière, Paris: L’ Harmattan 2007, p. 85.

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because he wants to maintain the paradoxical character of the aesthetic regime, whose nature is defined by contradiction and vagueness of contours.199 Above all, Rancière seeks to sustain the potential of the sensible, in which lies an inexhaustible number of possible configurations of individual and collective life. As Christian Ruby writes, the sensible is an original force, producing eternally, and in an incidental manner, an infinite diversification of things that cannot be completely channeled. … This is the central conviction: human existence, structured by time and capacity to act, is destined for infinite and unpredictable multiplicity, at least until the absolute tries to contain it in an artificial unity. However, even if an absolute strived to seize its senses, it could never fully confine it or restrict it. If we can displace categories of classical philosophy in this way, and affirm the power of the sensible, it is because it allows us to give credence to the idea according to which nothing is ever definitively closed or subjected to “a nature of things.”200

Police and Politics Contemporary aesthetics –​or at least its anti-​phenomenological branch, which develops in a different problem area than the one outlined by Mikel Dufrenne –​ departs from the utopia of pure experience, instead choosing to investigate its mediating character. Contemporary aesthetics analyzes the thought patterns, structures of understanding, popular beliefs, and prescriptive behavior layered on top of pure experience. It uncovers the mechanics of ordering the sensible, namely the “magic of words” that provides structure to the common world: “For our world consists not just in inferred or constructed entities but structures, divisions, and relationships that distinguish, separate, and connect them, all influenced by the historical, cultural, environmental, and technological conditions under which we construct human reality.”201 Experience is structured by language, and history, convention, and pragmatics meet in this structuring. Rancière would probably add freedom and contingency to this list. These are the basic parameters that determine the dynamics of the distribution of le sensible. Disjunctions and conjunctions become fixed in the word, influencing the arrangement of perceptual data, but because their source remains sensory experience, they remain inherently open to permanent revision.

199 J. L. Dronsfield, “Nowhere is Aesthetics contra Ethics: Rancière the Other Side of Lyotard,” Art and Reaserch: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2.1/​2008. 200 Ruby, L’Interruption, pp.  16–​17. 201 A.  Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World, Luton: Andrews UK 2011, p. 80.

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Rancière refers to this process in the domain of the subjective and of the social and discursive practices as le partage, which means “division, sharing,” playing with the basic ambiguity of the French word, usually translated as “distribution.” You can share a cake, and you can share a table with your fellow partygoers. You can divide a group into subgroups, but you can also share something with others. Thus, le partage simultaneously means separation and participation, the creation of a discontinuity and the formation of community. The distribution of the sensible is a process of distributing and redistributing spaces and times, places and identities, word and noise, the visible and the invisible; bringing to life an unstable arrangement that is susceptible to political reconfiguration, which has the power to make visible, to make common, and to make conceivable again.202 The sensory dimension of this process remains the most important; we find ourselves outside the problematic of any criticism of ideology because, as Rancière specifies, distribution of the sensible “is not a matter of illusion or knowledge. It is a matter of consensus or dissensus” (ROM 99). Perpetually reconfigured, le sensible is where a priori cognitive forms are established, negotiated, and challenged. As such, it is also the place where aesthetics and politics meet: It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time (POA 8).

Hence, politics does not mean power struggles or legislative procedures but a configuration of experience that commodifies certain perceived objects. Such politics stems not from any anthropological constant, which means its data is aesthetic in nature and always the matter of dispute (PdL 11). Rancière means not the processes of aestheticization of politics in Walter Benjamin’s, Hanna Arendt’s,203 or Jean Baudrillard’s understanding. It is not about any process at all, 2 02 Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” p. 10. 203 However, there are many parallels between Arendt and Rancière. In general terms, Rancière would agree with Arendt that subjectivity is relational and performative (meaning strictly dependent on interaction with others and on the chosen model of expression), that there is an aesthetic “purposelessness” inherent in all action, and that Kant’s power of judgment can harmonize people and things. However, Arendt presents the aesthetics of politics using a theatrical topology to argue that the common world resembles a stage on which people, like actors, play their parts, voice their opinions, and prove their points. For Rancière, the peculiarity of politics is that “its partners are no more constituted than is the object or stage of discussion itself ” (DOP

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since politics is aesthetic by definition. Once the division between the sensible and the senseful is abolished, artistic and political activities can be placed in the same space in which words and images connect to bodies and things, which in turn demand representation and situating. Rather than projecting transitions between these spheres –​which are not separable at all –​we should look closely at the distribution of the sensible. The confrontation of the two tendencies is responsible for its dynamics: to preserve existing boundaries and to challenge them. On the one hand, there are forces that sustain the distribution of the sensible sanctioned by the community, which Rancière calls police, and on the other hand, there are forces that disrupt this division, which he calls politics. Police is the symbolic constitution of society, which aims to eliminate emptiness and excess, to sustain the adequacy of functions, places, and ways of being. According to police logic, society consists of “groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places” (POA 36). Police maintains an order of parts that defines the gap between acting and speaking techniques. In this order, specific bodies are assigned to specific places and tasks. In this way, an order of the visible (le visible) and the utterable (le dicible) is constituted, which makes one activity visible and another invisible; some utterances are perceived as discourse, others as asemantic noise (M 52). Commentators repeat charges that Rancière describes police on an overly general level, while it seems police constitutes the space of life, unlike politics.204 Moreover, critics claim that other elements requiring clarification are mechanics of police’s functioning and how it is valued, meaning it remains unclear whether the existence of police stems from human nature or from laws of social entropy. However, these objections overlook the role of “the political,” the third element in this system, which I will discuss below. Rancière does not attribute a set of essential properties to police, nor does he derive them from some universals, for he generally avoids this kind of theoretical construction. Nevertheless, despite a certain degree of non-​ theorizing, he characterizes police quite precisely by means of a set of features. Let us try to extract them from the scattered descriptions.

38). See H. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, New York: The Viking Press 1961, pp. 143–​171. 204 In Hanna Arendt’s conceptualization, politics is the space of life. S. A. Chambers, “The Politics of the Police: From Neoliberalism to Anarchism, and Back to Democracy,” in: Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, eds. P. Bowman, R. Stamp, London: Continuum pp.  19–​22.

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Invisibility. The regulative mechanism of police is the tendency to naturalize the divisions it establishes:  “Zasadą policji jest przedstawianie siebie jako siły urzeczywistniającej istotę wspólnoty, przekształcającej reguły rządzenia w naturalne prawa społeczeństwa.”205 In turn, this makes all artistic and political acts inventive and transgressive, meaning they bring to life something that does not fit into order, and they go beyond what is considered natural. Objectivity. The police dogma assumes that situation data are objective, anyone who tries to contradict them will be an ignorant or a fool. By contrast, the message of politics is that all data is debatable. While police privatizes universality and immobilizes it as a general law elevated above particularity, politics de-​ privatizes universality and sets in motion multiple forms of singularization.206 Stasis. Police follows the “principle of saturation” (le principe de saturation; ETP 187), which inhibits all inversion, intrusion, and metamorphosis. Oppression. The police call is “Move along! There’s nothing to see here!” (DOP 37).207 It blocks the power of the sensible, which admittedly does not exist outside a priori forms of perception, but neither does it determine them; on the contrary, the sensible points to their non-​finality and contingency. Police is too often mistakenly identified with power,208 while Rancière –​consistently avoiding the term le pouvoir –​attempts to abstract from the history of domination and the history of emancipation two generalized models of managing aisthesis. His choice of terminology may seem somewhat eccentric, but only if we persist with the contemporary understanding of the word “police” and forget how it was used in the past. In his seventh lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault devotes some attention to the genealogy of the term

205 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 87. 206 The distrust with which Rancière treats all universalizations is evidenced by the number of statements after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in which the philosopher reconstructs a media scheme pitting good French people against bad immigrants, and the universal values of secularism and free speech against intolerance and backwardness. See the reconstruction of the entire argument: Ch. Ramond, Jacques Rancière. L’égalité des intelligences, Berlin, Paris 2019, pp. 133–​134. 207 This runs contrary to the Althusserian theoretical model, where ideology “recruits” subjects from among individuals, transforms them into subjects through an operation called interpellation, which can be imagined along the lines of a police call: “Hey, you there!” L. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso 2014, p. 264. 208 S. Žižek, “Le malaise dans la subjectivation politique,” Actuel Marx 28/​2000, pp. 137–​152.

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“police.” Until the sixteenth century, “police” had a double meaning. It referred to a form of community, an association under public authority, an undefined association –​associated with republican values –​or some kind of legal regulation. In the seventeenth century, as a result of a semantic shift, police became associated with “ the set of means by which the state’s forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order.”209 Moreover, Foucault mentions a model of this denotation, namely Turquet de Mauerne’s 1611 treatise that describes’ a utopian vision of a police state. In an ideally governed world, there are four police departments, dealing respectively with the education of children and youth, charity, matters of trade, and the real estate market. The scope of such police is to: inculcate decency, modesty, industriousness; regulate the spheres of population, economics, health care, and labor market; watch over the economic infrastructure; and reign over all social interactions. Acting with control mechanisms and coercive acts, such police becomes the “the order of everything that one can see in the city.”210 This last formulation seems to fit perfectly with the concept of the distribution of the sensible, highlighting the fact that art and politics operate on the border between the visible and the invisible. Significantly, the police order cannot be closed because it remains in a necessary relationship with that which eludes it. As Benjamin Arditi writes:‬‬ “police never rises above the n−1 threshold and the absence of a void doesn’t refer to the elimination of the uncounted but to their condition as outcasts. They are an empirical part that has no real part because they count less than others. The police is haunted by the ghost of the uncounted.”211 The ghost that haunts the police remains politics, namely the process of undermining the existing divisions and disrupting the system by supplementing it with an additional element, by including in active perception a hitherto invisible phenomenon and by granting a role in the community to those it previously excluded. Described by Rancière much more exhaustively, politics is defined by another set of parameters. Potential for Change. Politics opposes the police call by stating that there is always “something to look at,” because nothing is self-​evident. By setting in motion new terms and new representations, politics reconfigures the space of the visible

209 M.  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at The Collège de France, 1977–​78, trans. G. Burchell, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2007, p. 408. 210 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 414. 211 B. Arditi, “Fidelity to Disagreement: Jacques Rancière’s Politics without Ontology,” in: Distributions of the Sensible, p. 62.

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and the namable. For example, it abolishes the separation of two spheres: dark domestic life and bright public life, thus undermining the basic principle of police divide et impera. In order to deny the political quality of a category –​workers, women and so on –​all that was required was to assert that they belonged to a “domestic” space that was separated from public life, one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger or anger could emerge, but not actual speech demonstrating a shared aisthesis (DOP 38).

Politics changes the categories of these spaces:  it shifts the boundary or undermines the existence of the division itself, redefining which objects are to be treated as common, which are to be recognized as capable of defining these objects and arguing their case (AD 24). Interventionalism. The principle of politics is to violate and displace the patterns that structure experience. It is an interference with the visible and the utterable that has the character of an intervention. The latter means entering foreign territory to confront, separate, and disconnect, and then establishing a new connection, and subjective involvement in these activities. Dissensuality. Politics is “the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one” (DOP 37). It is not the domain of the confrontation of two particular interests or crystallized opinions but “the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself ” (DOP 38). Thanks to political manifestation, we perceive something that we could not perceive before: “Dissensus is the creation of a different sensible world in the existing sensible world” (MDS 24).212 Politics is not about the victory in a battle of arguments but about polemical demonstration and verification. Political action does not start from the foundation of truth; it only disturbs the interpretative machine, erasing the singularity of circumstances incessantly or inscribing them in categories of domination. Political action redefines basic divisions in contingent and idiomatic language, building alternative worlds whose coherence relies on endless dispute. Dispute. This transformative action is rooted in the dispute (le litige), meaning that the dispute creates politics by separating it from police, which seeks to erase the dispute (DOP 37). The precondition for the appearance of politics is not a proper name and adequate representation but the circulation of metaphorical terms. We are at the antipodes of the concept of communicative action known from the Habermasian model, which assumes that “partners that are already

212 Fr. “Le dissensus, c’est le fait de créer un monde sensible différent dans le monde sensible existant.”

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pre-​constituted as such and discursive forms that entail a speech community, the constraint of which is always explicable. Now, the specificity of political dissensus is that its partners are no more constituted than is the object or stage of discussion itself ” (DOP 38). Whatever the result, litigation undermines the monopoly of the legitimate word and opens an inquiry in which everyone may speak as long as they put their word at risk of verification. Egalitarianism. The fact that anyone can participate in an investigation of the legitimacy of divisions ensues from a preliminary egalitarian assumption. Indeed, politics begins from a rupture in the distribution of place and competence (and incompetence), when the beings ascribed to the invisible space of labor recognize themselves as inhabitants of the common world and attempt to make the invisible visible213 and to transform noise into voice. Politics exists only when the natural order of rulers, generals, and owners is undermined by the equality’s actualizations (M 37). Democracy. The police assessment considers differences in birth, occupation, position, and wealth, which designs a specific social body: one devoid of superfluities, meaning doubly defined, clearly separated from the outside, and internally structured. Politics is based on diversifying this whole, blurring its contours and introducing new elements into its interior: Politics exists insofar as the people is not identified with a race or a population, nor the poor with a particular disadvantaged sector, nor the proletariat with a group of industrial workers, etc., but insofar as these latter are identified with subjects that inscribe, in the form of a supplement to every count of the parts of society, a specific figure of the count of the uncounted or of the part of those without part (DOP 35).

The police calculus of shares and parts (des parts et des parties) of society is disrupted by an additional inscription:  by the addition of a part of those deprived of any share (une part des sans-​part). “Sans-​part” does not simply refer to the dominated and the excluded. While the dominated individual exists only in relation to the dominator, the one to whom “sans-​part” refers undermines domination itself, rejecting its accompanying status. The “sans-​part” individual exists only in the act of emancipation, which entails the need to disrupt the existing

213 We should also consider the opposite situation, namely when dominated groups become “hyper-​visible” –​like when they are stigmatized as foreign or dangerous –​and wish to link their emancipation to their right to invisibility. See M. Feola, The Powers of Sensibility: Aesthetic Politics through Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2018, p. 77.

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rules of division, even if only temporarily and provisionally.214 Therefore, the “sans-​part” individual situates herself at the very center of political activity. Indeed, the political subject cannot identify herself with any social group, she should be the operator that connects and disconnects places, identities, function, and capacities (D 40). The democratic era is neither the era of the masses nor of individuals but precisely the “sans-​part” era or, to be more precise, the era of empowerment open to the activity of metaphor and chance. Anarchism. Politics appears in a space where there are some relations between bodies and things to suspend their obviousness, to put question marks next to any communal affiliations, and to establish new relations between the terms that make common that which has not been shared before. Thus, politics has an an-​ archic element to it by constituting the moment of manifestation of universal equality, which assumes the form of a new political subjectification while referring to no sources. The arché logic belongs to police, and it is in constant conflict with the political movement of the abolition of divisions. Emancipatory figures freeze in the form of a new repartition; people plunge into population or race, the proletariat into militant representatives of the labor group, social or state structure utilize equality to turn it into its opposite. However, the egalitarian impulse energizes new actions that challenge the supposed naturalness of order and protects politics from the “animal forms” of the collective body or a hateful gang (OS 33). Instead of looking for enduring notions for new collective bodies capable of transforming themselves into revolutionary subjects like “the precariat,”215 we should accept the play of non-​definitive terms through which realizes the freedom impulse. 214 G. Gourgues, “Sans part,” in: Dictionnaire critique et interdisciplinaire de la participation, eds. I. Casillo, R. Barbier, L. Blondiaux, F. Chateauraynaud, J-​M. Fourniau, R. Lefebvre, C. Neveu, D. Salles, Paris: GIS Démocratie et Participation 2013. See an attempt to confront Rancière’s theory with the practice of movements “sans-​papiers:” V. Le Borgne de Boisriou, “Réflexions autour de la “part des sans-​part: Jacques Rancière à l’épreuve du terrain,” El banquete de los Dioses 3.4/​2015, pp.  208–​225. 215 This notion achieved great popularity thanks to the book by Guy Standing, who portrays a new group of oppressed –​consumed by the famous “four A’s” of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation –​and presents them as a potential force capable of reforming the world. However, the precondition for the possibility of this transformative action remains the acquisition of self-​awareness. The precariat is a “class-​in-​the-​making” that is yet to “become a class-​for-​itself.” G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2008, p. VIII. Rancière also notes the revolutionary potential of this group but does not see its strong identity as a necessary starting point for political action: “I think a general precarity is developing that’s tied

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The dialectic of police and politics has been the subject of numerous criticisms. Let us try to briefly organize the objections its critics raise. The first set of objections concerns the ahistorical and abstract character of these categories. Some criticize the definition of politics for being suspiciously monolithic: a theoretical construct applicable to all of history, from antiquity to the present, must undervalue the specificity of particular political practices. Others suggest that in insisting on his understanding of equality, Rancière defends the existence of “intrinsic values” transcendent of the social order; hence his aversion to the notion of power.216 Rancière responds indirectly to the first group through his choice of historical examples: he focuses on the nineteenth-​century class conflict, labor movement, and the subsequent emancipation of minorities, while the Aventine Secession serves him as an isolated example-​model stemming from pre-​modern times. To put it in Foucault’s terms, Rancière is not interested in the epoch of sovereign power but in the epoch of disciplinary power, which transforms the problem of expansion (how to conquer new territories?) into a problem of circulation and security (is everything in its place?).217 Finally, Rancière extensively describes how with the advent of new techniques of surveillance and punishment, we witness a birth of a revolutionary movement –​unleashed by les sans-​part –​of the poor willing to speak and write, who drown in the proliferation of words and speakers the principle of legitimate royal power and the very legitimacy of domination (NoH 20). To the second group –​those who attribute to Rancière a weak spot for transcending values –​he responds that equality is not at all a value in its own right but an initial assumption that reveals itself only in specific practice, which most often takes the form of exposing social injustices and inequalities by indicating logical gaps:  Is a worker a citizen? Is a black person a person? Can a French woman be French? Rancière would probably respond similarly to those who see in his reasoning the petitio principii fallacy, namely that he seeks a non-​political understanding of equality as the sine qua non of politics, which to quote Oliver to the economic system but is also a form of transversal subjectification of existing social identities. That comes very close to what I call the manifestation of those with no part (sans-​part)” (PA 82–​83). 216 Ch.  Nordmann, Bourdieu/​ Rancière. La politique entre sociologie et philosophie, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam 2006, pp. 179–​182, 200; A. Badiou, “Savoir et pouvoir après la tempête,” p. 240; A. Birnbaum, Egalité radicale. Diviser Rancière, Paris: Édtions Amsterdam 2018, pp. 22–​23. 2 17 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 92.

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Marchart’s objections: “by turning equality into a non-​political maxim, he transforms a fighting word well-​known from political struggle into a transcendental, a-​historical condition. One may even speak about a secret –​though explicitly disavowed –​Rousseauism in Rancière as any social order is supposed to rest on a hypothetical state of originary equality.”218 The misunderstanding is that equality here is not any “hypothetical state” but a mode of action that activates the logic of the performative: the assumption of equality allows it to exist in the same way that the assumption of inequality perpetuates the latter. Thus, if we can speak of an “emancipatory apriorism” at all, it is certainly cut off from any background (metaphysical, anthropological). The same applies to the notions of “politics” and “police.” They do not constitute a “discursive anomaly”219 in Rancière’s consistently nominalist idiom. Among the duplicated and multiplied figures (logics, sciences, or regimes), these two categories are temporary attempts to define the general mechanics of sense transformation. However, we cannot seek conceptual realism where the meaning of a conceptual pair depends on their relation to one other. Relationality. This is a common feature of both phenomena. Politics can exist because there is a prior independent community with a definite distribution of places, functions, and identities guarded by police. Politics encounters police everywhere, because police establishes the status quo. Politics brings nothing peculiar to this encounter of heterogeneities, because it has no objects or issues proper to itself, it merely records in the form of a dispute the verification of equality in the police order (D 39). Politics cannot aim at establishing new police220 because the former is conditioned by equality, which in turn is founded on the universality of logos, which guarantees the possibility of articulating one’s own reasons. It is an antagonistic relationship between two ineffable elements (because the creation of new forms of distributing the sensible has an ordering character) or “police politics” (as a homeopathic pact of counted groups that attempt to reconfigure what is given).221 All those who grasp the relationality of this pair of notions make other, much more serious accusations. I will operationalize them 218 O. Marchart, “The Second Return of the Political: Democracy and the Syllogism of Equality,” in: Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, pp.  134–​135. 219 B. Bosteels, “La leçon de Rancière: Malaise dans la politique ou on a raison de se mésentendre,” in: La Philosophie déplacée, pp.  54–​57. 220 Cf. doubts in Nordmann: Bourdieu/​Rancière, p. 209. 221 B. Arditi, “Fidelity to Disagreement: Jacques Rancière’s Politics without Ontology,” in: Distributions of the Sensible, eds. S. Durham and D. Gaonkar, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2019, p. 72; S. Chambers, “The Politics of Police,”.

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into two groups, which is not difficult, because some of them accuse Rancière of reprehensible conservatism, while others –​of dangerous radicalism. Slavoj Žižek obviously belongs to the former group. He sees in this philosophy a conciliatory proposal to abandon dreams of a revolution and to stop at a permanent insurrection, in which politics (“rebellion of universality”) clashes with police (“administration of the social world”) in an underhand combat of concepts. However, we should abandon this ridiculous dialectic altogether and begin to practice real politics, namely politics that strikes at police and changes its modus.222 Elswhere, Žižek adds that Rancière unfortunately falls into the trap of “marginal politics that accepts the logic of momentary outbursts of impossible radical politics, which contain its own defeat and must give way in the face of the existing Order.” Even more, Rancière is to deliberately maintain this marginal politics as proof of its authenticity, because he needs the police order only as a great enemy that guarantees the possibility of constant subversive work, allowing him to disqualify any idea of a comprehensive subversion of order (global revolution) as a proto-​totalitarian option. As a result, Rancière is to leave us with nothing, meaning with a scenario of “hysterical provocation,” a recipe for a dissuasive procedure that neutralizes any revolutionary potential and quietly discredits visions of a new order, be it economic, social, or symbolic.223 Žižek’s attack is difficult to argue with: it combines a fairly faithful paraphrase of the thought with strong evaluative accents; with the obvious reservation that political action does not capitulate to the existing order, but rather changes it. Indeed, Rancière is not interested in the idea of a global revolution but only in the possibility of momentary, local, cumulative change. He chooses “the multiplicity of small ruptures, of small shifts, that refuse the blackmail of radical subversion.”224 What is worse (for Žižek), Rancière does not identify police with the hated (quasi)totalitarian order. Every administrative order has a police character, which combines imposed rigidity with the spontaneity of social relations. Therefore, there is worse and better police. The former ignores the resistance of egalitarian politics, the latter allows for the interference of an egalitarian logic to alter its own (D 31). This is the very essence of a conciliatory attitude. Certainly, all those who expect philosophy to conceive of comprehensive revolutionary change will find it overly conservative.

222 S.  Žižek, Living in the End Times, London: Verso Books 2010, pp. 199–​200. 223 S.  Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso Books 2000, pp. 232–​234. 224 Carnevale, Kelsey, “Art of the Possible,” p. 267.

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Alain Badiou criticizes Rancière in a similar way. Badiou states straightforwardly that Rancière is neither a philosopher nor a political theorist because he is to neither offer a coherent ontology nor frequently discuss politics. Instead, Rancière plays with rejecting prescriptions and undermining the position of authority, including philosophical authority. Rancière’s intention is to fit the great anti-​philosophical tradition: he does not use a strong rejection, which is in itself the gesture of a master, yet endlessly demolishes theories, historical narratives, and revolutionary myths –​offering nothing in return. His theory of the gap –​according to which the people do not fit into any calculation –​serves as an alibi and an explanation: neither a community of equals nor a militant uprising is conceivable. The result is a subtle variation of the twentieth-​century anti-​Platonism: “a democratic antiphilosophy that identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the collective that sublates the contingent historicity of nominations.” Moreover, Badiou objects the disqualification of philosophy as a tool of politics, the avoidance of the problematic of the state to speak in general terms about society or police, and the omission of the fact that political processes are organized, which in turn, entails the absence of the central figure of politics, namely the political fighter.225 We may understand these objections only based on Badiou’s own philosophical project. Badiou criticizes the weakening of authority, because he makes huge foundational gestures encompassing ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics. He is irritated by anti-​Platonism, because all his thought revolves around the event, namely the place outside of being where truth-​producing procedures originate. The event as historical conditioning disappears, but thanks to it, a rupture can appear, and with it appears something that could not be thought, named, or seen in the situation. The apparent similarity to Rancière’s reconfiguration of the sensible conceals more important differences. Badiou distinguishes four generic procedures that “generate –​infinitely –​truths concerning situations; truths substracted from knowledge which are only counted by the state in the anonymity of their being.”226 These are the procedures of science, politics, art, and love; in the Second Manifesto for Philosophy, we learn about their mutations: technology, management, culture, and sex. All other kinds of practices produce no truth and this also holds true of philosophy. How then could philosophy become an instrument of politics? Its stake should be proposing “a unified conceptual space in

225 A.  Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker, London and New York: Verso 2005, p. 115. 226 A.  Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, London: Continuum 2005, p. 340.

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which naming takes place of events that serve as the point of departure for truth procedures. … It does not establish any truth but it sets a locus of truths.”227 For Rancière, this mystique of the event is unacceptable. First, Rancière suspects that it represents yet another disguise for the “master” discourse. As we read in Rancière’s La chair des mots, whenever Badiou tries to imagine the event that resolves the play of minor truths, he needs the figure of a prophet, poet, or philosopher of the event. They are Saint Paul, Pascal, Mallarmé, Lacan –​the thinkers of madness, bet, roll of the dice, the Real. Because they reveal the event, they simultaneously proclaim the indistinguishability of the event from its discourse, and this indistinguishability then grants itself to the exegete’s discourse (PdL 223–​224). Second, the basic parameters of politics in Badiou’s thought are unacceptable. In Can Politics Be Thought?, he rejects any consensual options and states categorically that “it belongs to the essence of politics to exclude all representation … Its essence resides entirely in the fidelity to the event such as it materializes in the network of interventions.”228 Rancière argues politics resembles not an “axiomatic prescription”229 that escapes the logic of reason. Instead, politics is a completely rational action subordinated to the syllogism of equality. Politics seeks not a utopian future but a transformation of the sensible world. Its existence is momentary: “the political moment” is the breaking of consensus, the breaking of communal matter, the revealing of the possibility of another world that undermines the obviousness of the existing world (MP 9). According to the sixth thesis on politics (from “Ten Theses on Politics”), politics is a provisional exception in the history of forms of domination. This is where Rancière exposes himself to accusations of being reactionary or cynical. According to him, “the ‘normal’ order of things is for human communities to gather under the rule of those who are qualified to rule and whose qualifications are evident by dint of their very rule” (DOP 35). Historically, the power of birth was the oldest. Then, through social evolution, it was replaced by the power of wealth, which dominates until this day. The conditions of possibility for politics arise in the tension between democracy and the rule of wealth; this rudimentary conflict is obscured by the opposition of capitalism and socialism/​communism (MP 64). However, albeit it appears constantly in

227 A.  Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. N.  Madarasz, New York:  SUNY Press 1999, p. 37. 228 A.  Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought? Followed by an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State, trans. B. Bosceels, Durham: Duke University Press 2018, p. 82. 229 Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, p. 80.

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this unchanging balance of power, politics cannot demolish the global oligarchic system. It can only transform it, forcing “bad police” to transform into... slightly better police. If someone does not see that the social progress is inscribed in this vision, if someone does not hear the emancipatory pathos emanating from these writings, they may consider them a corrupting proposal: “I give you the tools to enjoy the provocations of art and the aesthetics of emancipatory movements, but in exchange you must abandon revolutionary radicalism.” Someone fixated on a vision of the subversion of the global order might even attribute to this vision a defeatism. In one such vision, Rancière resembles the protagonist of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, who lingers under a solitary tree and contemplates a gloomy landscape.230 While for some this balance “on the edges of the political” does not seem radical enough, others associate Rancière’s thought with an extremist approach. For example, Todd May associates Rancière’s position with modern anarchism. May argues that it is only the anarchism that is not a critique of state but a critique of domination –​or rather of the multiplicity of relations of domination that permeate the social field –​that can be considered a genuine democratic politics in Rancière’s understanding. Unlike those who seek top-​down politics –​be it the liberal politics of the state and its constraints or the Marxist politics of the party avant-​garde –​Rancière’s politics is to remain strictly bottom-​up. It is those who participate in collective action, starting from the assumption of pre-​statutory equality, who give political character to any action. One only needs finish Rancière’s thought, namely postulate the destruction of police by politics.231 As Samuel A. Chambers comments on this interpretation, the rarity of politics resonates with the revolutionary project of anarchism (the rejection of democratic “politics”), allowing itself to be reconciled with Kropotkin’s often-​quoted maxim about communist anarchism being “the name given to a principle of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government.”232 However, there are significant shifts in May’s interpretation: equality is subject to substantialization, and politics is thought in isolation from police. 230 A. Gibson, “The Unfinished Song: Intermittency and Melancholy in Rancière,” Paragraph 28.1/​2005, pp.  63–​64. 231 T. May, “Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality,” SubStance 36.2/​2007, p. 25; T. May “Rancière and Anarchism,” in: Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, eds. J.-​P. Deranty, A. Ross, London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2012, pp. 117–​128; T. May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality, Edinburgh 2008, pp. 42–​49. 232 Chambers, “The Politics of the Police,” p. 31.

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Others view Rancière’s supposed radicalism as a threat, as a specter that is to haunt modern social philosophy and aesthetics. Renaud Pasquier reflects on the risky combination of irreducibility (politics will never identify with police) and necessary relation (there is no politics beyond police). As Pasquier argues, the result is the risk of a twofold radicalization. On the one hand, the emphasis on the bond between police and politics can generate skeptical and fatalistic attitudes: political subjectifications are ephemeral and always absorbed by a non-​egalitarian social order. On the other hand, the focus on irreducibility leads to an anti-​institutional attitude, and in extreme cases, to a mystique of the event and exaltation of “permanent revolution.”233 However, let us note that Rancière refuses to equate institution and police. He does not contrast the oppressive state and democracy, as Miguel Abensour does. Rancière would probably agree with Abensour that the political relation is based on the fact that the totality of the existence of the people does not allow itself either to be enclosed in the form of a party or to be managed by a constitutional order and that this relation is established through a clash between the subject of emancipation and state particularism, which invariably holds the dominant position.234 However, in Rancière’s reflection, the state as a great institution is merely a privileged activity terrain for police. The struggle between police and politics happens in all institutions, including those that are independent, equalitarian, or “anti-​state” (revolutionary). Rancière attempts to distance the pseudo-​radical idea that “we must escape the pseudo-​radical logic that disqualifies as mere appearance the battle over the institutions and procedures of politics” (EQT 13).235 Politics encounters police everywhere, it needs police as a point of reference, and the effects of the political actualizations of equality are inscribed exclusively in institutions, transforming the police order, be it legal, class, or moral. Foreshadowing my reflections below, Rancière proposes a radical rethinking of democracy but never separates it from the institutional field.236 Rancière cautions us

233 R. Pasquier, “Police, politique, monde: quelques questions,” Labirynthe 17.1/​2004. 234 M.  Abensour, La Démocratie contre l’État. Marx et le moment machiavélien, Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1997, pp. 72–​81. 235 Fr. “Il faut sortir de la logique pseudoradicale qui disqualifie comme simple apparence la bataille sur les institutions et les procédures de la politique.” 236 A. Munro, “Rancière et l’inscription de l’égalité,” in:  Démocratie et modernité. La pensée politique française contemporaine, eds. M. Chevrier, Y. Couture, S. Vibert, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes 2015, pp. 250–​255; A. J. Norval, “Writing a Name in the Sky: Rancière, Cavell, and the Possibility of Egalitarian Inscription,”

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not to treat any institutions as the embodiment of democracy, but he also warns us against negating them, because they constitute a paradoxical space of politics’ inscriptions. Some leftist thinkers are unwilling to accept the unstable balance of the police/​ politics system. Étienne Balibar rejects the dismissal of classical problematics of political philosophy and Rancière’s systematic omission of the matters of emancipation, change, and civility,237 which makes it impossible to conceive of profound transformations (not revolutionary, but also not purely reformist). Axel Honneth makes similar remarks and insists on the everyday experience of small revolts and subversions as part of a permanent struggle for recognition (ROM 73). Others argue that such tools make it impossible to understand periods of long-​term stability and the evolutionary transformations of social forms.238 Finally, others denounce Rancière’s incorrigible idealism and state that by placing politics outside the conflicts of interest behind party games, Rancière deprives himself of the opportunity to analyze real social divisions. Moreover, he is to underestimate the importance of non-​egalitarian processes, their dual power of seduction and oppression.239

in: The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, ed. N. Kompridis, New York: Bloomsbury 2014, pp.  189–​226. 237 E. Balibar, “Qu’est-​ce que la philosophie politique? Notes pour une utopie,” Actuel Marx 28/​2000, pp. 11–​22. Overall, Balibar situates himself close to Rancière’s thought while emphasizing a different approach to the theatricality of politics and violence: “he [Rancière] would insist on the manifest side of the scene, the semantic and sensible process that makes the conflict visible, and I would insist on the hidden side of the scene (except for some violent intrusions), which calls for a civilization of revolution itself. He would also insist on the emancipatory breakthrough that sets a new stage for the political by giving a new visibility to the discourses and the bodies that were barred from public expression, and I would insist on the risks, the ambivalence of the violence that is necessary to break the consensus, to remove or open up the power structures that prevent the subaltern from sharing in the public sphere or the dominant culture.” “Interview with Etienne Balibar,” in: Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, eds. B. Hinderliter, V. Maimon, J. Mansoor, S. McCormick, Durham: Duke University Press 2009, p. 322. 238 N.  Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-​thinking Emancipation, London: Continuum 2007, pp.  105–​106. 239 D. Schreiber, “L’Avenir de l’égalité (remarques sur “La Mésentente”),” Labirynthe 17.1/​ 2004, pp. 17–​19. This interpretation is contradicted by Rancière in the main part of Hatred of Democracy.

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Although it is difficult to agree with some of the allegations, many of them indicate that there are multiple risks associated with this concept. However, to put it in pragmatic terms, it seems to me that the possibilities offered by this vocabulary determine its attractiveness. I see in Rancière’s writings a concern for the stabilization of the conceptual machinery. Its manifestation seems to be the introduction of “the political” (le politique), which is an institutional space where police and politics meet. Le politique would be the meeting point of heterogeneous processes: the police practice of hierarchical sharing places and functions and the egalitarian processes that assume and verify universal equality, whose proper name is politics. This is where the foundations of law and power find their definitions as the rules of common life.240 It is the domain of inextinguishable antagonism, smoldering discord, to which Rancière devotes separate consideration.

White and White Distributing the sensible happens in the process of negotiation. It is not, as in communication theories, a rational debate in which crystallized rationales clash, but a conversation mediated by the circulation of metaphorical expressions, which arrange the basic dimensions of the common world. It is not about any “mental scripts,” the net of categories imposed on surroundings. No object exists prior to acts of categorization, which are temporary in nature and whose shape depends on an irremovable disagreement. By disagreement (mésentente) Rancière means the situation of the word, in which one or more interlocutors fail to see what another is saying. Disagreement remains different from ignorance (méconnaissance) when the sender does not understand what her interlocutor or she herself is saying. It is also different from misunderstanding (malentend), which originates from imprecision. Disagreement has its own logic. In the domain of the political (le politique), there is a process of establishing social practices, binding the visible, the audible (emphasized by the ambiguity of the French word entendre),241 the expressible, and the executable, which gravitates toward police acts of naming, separating, and immobilizing. However, all these 240 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 10. 241 “Entendre” means “to hear” and “to understand” at the same time, so the term mésentente signals a tension between sound and meaning. There are even suggestions to translate it into English as “mishearing.” See J. P. Cachopo, P. Nickelson, C. Stover, “Introduction,” in: Rancière and Music, eds. J. P. Cachopo, P. Nickelson, C. Stover, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2020, p. 9.

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arrangements are arbitrary in nature, highlighted by the nature of the sensible –​ which is meaning-​producing and unmanageable –​which makes the arrangement of sensory data exposed to transformation and reconfiguration. The moments of these reconfigurations are called politics. For them to occur, an actualization of the principle of pre-​established equality is necessary, but the condition of the possibility of politics to emerge is also the disagreement, the contested status of the reality that is the result of slicing up the sensible world. Contrasting this theory with two similar theories and indicating the constitutive differences between them enables us to understand its specificity. Ranciére’s primary point of reference as a philosopher of disagreement is Jean-​François Lyotard’s idea of “differend.” In The Différend, Lyotard draws on the theory of language games familiar from Philosophical Investigations, taking up two strands of Wittgensteinian considerations, the negative and the positive. First, language has no unifying essence or logical structure determining a priori all its uses. Second, language is a dispersed multiplicity of practices whose rules, purposes, and meanings are determined by intersubjective uses, that is, by particular –​autonomous, incomparable –​social pragmatics. Lyotard takes up the idea of language as a set of heterogeneous practices. Moreover, Lyotard argues that sentences –​ singular phenomena with the structure of the event –​combine with each other according to sentence orders, forming types of discourses. Although there is congruence in discourses, they are mutually incommensurable, for there is no meta-​argument that would enable conflict-​free translation. This is where a semantic disjunction is born, which we can dispose of only with violence, meaning by masking it with a false consensual agreement or a unifying grand narrative. Unlike the dispute, the differend cannot be resolved, because there is no “rule of judgment,” and each side has adequate legitimacy for its reasons: As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgment to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule).242

Therefore, we deal here not with a clash of rationales occurring on the same plane but with a clash of incommensurable orders. It may block all articulation, which is when it turns into an “instant of language wherein something which

242 Lyotard, The Differend, p. xi.

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must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.”243 However, it can also surface in dialog and assume a tragic dimension, leading to harm –​injustice –​which in a given discursive system cannot find its expression. In this situation, Lyotard (averse to systematic ethics) chooses a “moral” solution: one must “lead toward disagreements,”244 discover the conflict in the apparent agreement of arguments and types of discourse so as to give voice to those who suffer injustice without being able to count on the recognition of their rights. Therefore, Lyotard follows a pattern:  he moves from descriptivism to prescriptivism:  he recognizes the contingent and undetermined nature of the sentence and then deduces from this observation the command to act. However, Lyotard also takes the reverse path as he places the moral norm retroactively in the philosophy of language: to listen closely to the differend that does justice to the Other, one must accept the eventual nature of the sentence by not asking “What is this?” but “What is happening?” The new sensitivity focused on the respect for discursive incommensurability is connected to the heritage of modernity, which postmodernity then undertakes and radicalizes by guarding such values as “incommensurability, heterogeneity, the differend … the absence of a supreme tribunal.”245 Usually, scholars criticize Lyotard for his one-​sided interpretation of Wittgenstein’s late writings and for absolutizing the autonomy and heterogeneity of sentence rule systems and discourse types, while in reality, incommensurability is never absolute, if only because linguistic forms are not formed in a vacuum but in relation to other forms.246 Rancière attempts to reformulate these issues. He rejects the idea of the heterogeneity of utterance regimes and the absence of rules of judgment, and in place of le différend, he inserts la mésentente, meaning a disagreement that is less about argumentation and more about the argumented (l’argumentable), that is, the presence or absence of an object common to the interlocutors. It is not a conflict between the one who says “black” and the one who says “white,” but between the one who says “white” and the one who also says “white” but understands by it something completely different. The extreme situation is that one of them does not perceive the object of which the other speaks (M  12–​14).

243 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 13. 244 Lyotard, “Answering the Question,” p. 61. 245 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 135. 246 W.  Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyczna moderna, trans. R. Kubicki, A. Zeidler-​ Janiszewska, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo ON 1998, p. 353.

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In the theoretical scenario proposed by Lyotard, the differend becomes the vehicle of an infinite promise: the Other is to make itself present in radical heterogeneity and all attempts to transcend this heterogeneity –​that is, to reconfigure the sensible in such a way as to fund a shared world –​are blocked. This inevitably leads to dramatic victimization (ME 145), namely the replacement of “grand narrative” with the “absolute victim” and the celebration of the latter on the grounds of ethics. This approach allows us to think of a disagreement whose structures refer to the dispute about the matter of discussion, enabling entry into conflict about “the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it” (D 26–​27). In short, Lyotard neutralizes the possibility of political action. Like other postmodern thinkers, Lyotard proposes to overcome modernity247 and mourn politics. Reality as “a swarm of senses [that] lights upon a field pinpointed by a world”248 is a heterogeneous phenomenon that demands distanced contemplation; it is not the object of change or dwelling place. As Alberto Gualandi writes, Lyotard develops a sophistic model of politics understood as “politics of difference, ethics of guarding the plurality of opinions, and the multiplicity of language games.”249 The point is that –​in Rancière’s vocabulary –​there is no such thing as the politics of conserving differences. Political discourse is not one of many kinds of discourse but such a subversive mode of distributing the sensible that undermines the social order.250 Political gesture constructs a relationship between seemingly separate things, such as the equality proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the dark realm of working hours and conditions. Political gesture establishes a relation between two separate things by bringing to light the inegalitarian distribution of opportunities and contrasting it with the assumed equality. It points to incommensurability, but this incommensurability becomes the measure of two orders. In doing so, political gesture rejects the ethics of difference and allows for the construction of a new relationship, contingent yet actively affecting the status quo. Thanks to the logic of disagreement, politics escapes both the logic of domination and the 247 I refer to the category of Nietzschean Verwindung, reinterpreted by Giani Vattimo in “Verwindung: Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy,” SubStance 16.2(53)/​1987, pp.  7–​17. 248 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 50. 249 A.  Gualandi, Lyotard, Paris: Belles Lettres 1999, pp. 38–​39. Fr. “Une politique de la différence, une éthique du gardiennage de la pluralité des opinions et de la multiplicité des jeux de langage.” 250 See J.-​L. Déotte, R. Lapidus, “The Differences Between Rancière’s Mésentente (Political Disagreement) and Lyotard’s Différend,” SubStance 33.1/​2004.

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sophistic logic of irreducible multiplicity: “Politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds” (D 42). Chantal Mouffe’s “agonism” comes closest to Rancière’s position. Mouffe develops her own conceptual game:  as “the political” she understands the dimension of antagonism underlying every society, while by “politics” –​the set of procedures and institutions that create the order enabling human coexistence.251 Nevertheless, Mouffe conceptualizes the phenomena of dispute and disagreement in a similar way. She assumes that every society consists of embedded practices aimed at establishing order in the face of contingency and that every established order is based on a form of exclusion, a suppression of alternative possibilities. The social constitutes a space of clash between hegemonic articulations and counter-​hegemonic activity. Consequently, in line with Carl Schmitt’s anti-​liberal thought, one cannot hope to subordinate competition in the social field to a top-​down norm of rationality. The social world is pluralistic in nature, torn by irresolvable conflicts (which elude liberal thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and John Gray); and this pluralism must be accepted as such, without indulging in dangerous fantasies of some form of unanimity or consensual reconciliation. At the same time –​against Schmitt252 –​the we/​they opposition must be redefined to reconcile the conflictual nature of social interaction with the model of modern pluralistic democracy: If we want to acknowledge on one side the permanence of the antagonistic dimension of the conflict, while on the other side allowing for the possibility of its “taming,” we need to envisage a third type of relation. This is the type of relation which I have proposed to call “agonism.” While antagonism is a we/​they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/​they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless organize the legitimacy of their opponents.253

With this solution, we may say goodbye to the ideas of practical good consensus (which is the result of unstable hegemony) and utopian consensus 251 Ch.  Mouffe, On the Political, London and New York: Routledge 2005, p. 9. 2 52 Schmitt defines the political directly as a dimension of actions resulting from the real possibility of struggle. The potentiality of open conflict, based on the fundamental enemy/​friend dichotomy and reinforced by the sovereign’s right to dispose of human life, constitutes, in his opinion, the essence of social order. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2007. See Ch. Mouffe, “Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy,” in: The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Ch. Mouffe, New York: Verso 1999, pp. 38–​53. 253 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 16.

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without exclusions (which would erase the political). Thus, we may reinforce democratic politics in which parties to the conflict are opponent, “legitimate enemies,” both sharing support for “the ethico-​political principles of liberal democracy,”254 namely equality and freedom. This project declaratively seeks to defense and reform the dominant hybrid political model, in which contingently and historically intertwine two different traditions (liberal and democratic) and logics (equalitarian and libertarian). The object of defense remains the state of unstable equilibrium in which these two logics coexist, neither of them can fully realize itself and establish sole authority, while remaining in constant tension, both generate new emancipatory aspirations. Meanwhile, the reform calls for accepting agonism as a political principle and moving to “radical democracy,” namely broadening the pluralistic spectrum and allowing more actors to participate in the dispute. I believe we clearly see now the differences and similarities between Mouffe’s and Rancière’s concepts. Both feel aversion to consensual governance and post-​ political utopias, emphasize the importance of conflict in social relations, and are convinced that political practice is not a confrontation of the interests of pre-​constituted identities but a process that constitutes those identities, believing that the subject should be treated not in an essentialist manner but in terms of its position in a discursive structure.255 The fundamental difference lies how the two thinkers profile the political and the politics-​democracy relationship. For Rancière, politics is a rare and ephemeral phenomenon, not part of hegemonic struggles and counter-​hegemonic practices. Such politics brings about updates of equality that fit neither the tradition of liberal struggles for individual liberties nor “democratic” struggles for the redistribution of wealth and power. Indeed, politics for Rancière remains intrinsically linked to democracy, but one understood as a regime of unqualified freedom, not as a state system. This is because we live in oligarchic states, shaken by political moments that change our conceptual networks and our aisthesis. There is no “political” taming of antagonism and its transformation into agonism. The political act reveals a disagreement in the basic data –​the l’argumentable that is the focus of the dispute –​becomes a seed of change, which is then organized by police order-​making.

254 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London and New York: Verso 2000, p. 102. 255 This point was best theorized in E. Laclau, Ch. Mouffe, Hegemony and the Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London and New York: Verson 1985, p. 115.

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Another role applies also to artistic practices. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Mouffe and Laclau argue that the social is founded on attempts to control the play of discursive difference, to force it into a finite order (always unstable and uncertain). Most articulatory practices are “practices of binding,” creating shared nexuses that stabilize meanings, seeking quilting points.256 However, even they are subject to the processes of polysemy and intertextualization, undermined by the element of discursiveness. Art and literature have a subversive power because they stage the intrusion of contingency into these structures that strive for stability. Symbols, metaphors, paradoxes so beloved by writers and artists “deform and question the literal character of every necessity.” Polysemy and inevitable intertextuality blur the boundaries of discourses responsible for the creation of the subject, causing the signifier to spread in an infinite field of discursivity.257 As we know, Rancière does not limit himself to this aspect –​negative (destabilizing) and revelatory (revealing the provisionality and contingency of discourses) –​or even consider it the most important aspect. The work that sets in motion a circulation of representations and determinations can become the basis for a new subjectification. In The Politics of Literature, Rancière juxtaposes disagreement with literary “misunderstanding” (le malentendu littéraire), which similarly disrupts the police calculus by introducing a disturbing excess into the relation of bodies and words. On the one hand, la mésentente and le malentendu differ in dissensuality: the former takes the form of processes of empowerment, transforming the

256 The key role in this process belongs to quilting points (point de capiton), which stabilize the discursive formation and stop the flow of differences. It is around them –​in the process of transforming relations into a system –​that individual and social identities are constituted. Concrete articulations change the identities of social actors and retroactively produce group interests (even class is the result of discourse). See E. Laclau, “The Impossibility of Society” in: New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London, New York: Verso 1990, pp. 89–​92. 257 E. Laclau, Ch. Mouffe, Hegemony and the Socialist Strategy, p. 114. “Polysemy … disarticulates a discursive structure. That is what establishes the overdetermined, symbolic dimension of every social identity. Society never manages to be identical to itself, as every nodal point is constituted within an intertextuality that overflows it. The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.” E. Laclau, Ch. Mouffe, Hegemony and the Socialist Strategy, p. 113.

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abstract “we” into political actors, while the latter dissolves objects of expression into the matter of anonymous life (P 54). However, both produce new forms of sensibility by working together and borrowing procedures from one other. The essay “Le Malentendu littéraire” provides a meditation about this profound similarity. Many critics would like to reduce this phenomenon to a class issue, like Sartre, who argues in What is Literature? that from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, the creators of high literature have refused to be understood by a broad reading public, because they refuse to serve public affairs, and in turn, establish a distance supposed to ensure their elite position. On the other hand, ultraconservative critics –​once again united with progressive advocates of l’art social –​accuse authors such as Flaubert and Proust of literary excess like plot incoherence or overabundance of description. Rancière views this as politics of literature. The loss of representational proportion involves the disintegration of social hierarchy as its derivative/​tool of further deregulation. Verbal excess shatters molar identities and replaces them with molecular multiplicities. The opening of literature to the “the tide of beings and things, the tide of superfluous bodies” (P 49)258 introduces a peculiar error into the calculus of a part of society. This premeditated lapse in communal calculus works in the same way as the erroneous operation we call democracy. Le mécompte littéraire and le mécompte démocratique collaborate in the procedure of dismantling the border between speech and speechlessness, of including in the community those who were not taken into the account. They meet in the act of disrupting the paradigm of proportion between bodies and meanings, the paradigm of appropriateness and saturation (PdL 51). Both these elements are equally threatened by “consensual stupefaction:” the erasure of discord and misunderstanding, the reconciliation of sense and sensibility by which we see the same things and understand them in the same way.

Consensual Times The terms consensus and dissensus operate on two semantic levels whose interrelation determines the entirety of political thinking. On the first level, we find a pair of opposites:  agreement/​disagreement (in French accord/​désaccord). At a deeper level, we find the interference of political and epistemological issues, since what is at stake is the agreement or disagreement of propositional positions formulated in relation to a common object of reference (l’entente /​la mésentente).

258 Fr. “la marée des êres et des choses, la marée des corps superflus.”

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In this case, dissensus would imply problems in defining the object and different profiling of the rationality of the conversation and the stakes of the debate.259 The philosophers who take deliberative position on this issue project a close connection between the two levels, a mutual agreement between the procedures of debate and the negotiation of factuality. John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas –​ despite their considerable differences –​present a similar option. They argue that political decisions should be prepared through a process of argumentation and attempt to outline an ideal communicative situation. The model deliberation process is based on the principles of inclusion (inclusion of all interested parties) and symmetry of relations (equality of participants in the debate). The model should be free from violence, force, and discrimination, namely independent of structures of power and domination, and open to new topics. On the other hand, the norms of universal agreement about the original situation should be clarified, and the vision of the common world should be subordinated to a superior instance, namely the intersubjectively established communicative reason. This reason serves to establish procedures for argumentation and consensus; it is a nonsubstantial entity continually produced in public space. As Habermas writes, this reason establishes a formal consensus about the unity of conduct, a consensus being the basis of a pluralistic system and ensuring each individual’s participation in a political community.260 According to John Rawls, the one, indivisible, and yet dynamically changing public reason is open to all citizens and provides agreement beyond closed, mutually incompatible worldviews. By participating in public reason, we may appeal to arguments drawn from our accepted doctrines, but only if, according to the principle of the clause, we are manifesting purely public reasons.261 In all his treatises, Rawls makes a significant connection between the two levels of consensus that I mentioned above. This is best visible in the idea of “overlapping consensus,” which as we read in Political Liberalism, is supposed to be an agreement between “reasonable (as opposed to unintelligent or irrational) extensive doctrines” of religion, philosophy, and morality. Moreover, such an agreement is subject to justice as impartiality not based on any of these doctrines (IV, §3.1).

259 G.  Corroyer, “Consensus/​Dissensus,” in: Dictionnaire Critique, www.dicop​art.fr/​fr/​ dico/​con​sens​usdi​ssen​sus. 260 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge: MIT Press 1996, p. 496–​497. 261 J.  Rawls, The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999, pp. 153–​156.

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Let us note that the assumed egalitarianism in a pluralistic system of social negotiation overlaps with the norm of rationality that erases any problem with the commonality of the matter of the dispute. This rationality is the initial premise and core of the entire foundation of democracy: “History tells of a plurality of not unreasonable comprehensive doctrines. This makes an overlapping consensus possible, thus reducing the conflict between political and other values” (IV, § 1.6).262 In this case, political conflict constitutes a desirable element only if it integrates into the totality of deliberately and reasonably shaped power relations. An overlapping consensus reinforced by the principle of extra-​doctrinal justice is supposed to pacify any dispute. It is no accident that the term “overlapping consensus” first appeared in Theory of Justice as a term for processes that undermine the rationality of civil disobedience in a democratic society.263 The system is supposed to strive for an ideal state in which deeply disagreeable rationales overlap and emerging common ground delineates a space of individual freedoms.

Such theories face, above all, charges of formalism. First, it is said that the deliberative model is based on a purely formal rationalist ethics.264 According to Kantian “substantialist” ethics, if we obey the norms of rationality, it is because we are rational beings acting in accordance with our species’ destiny. The deliberative model attempts to establish universal norms based on the will to consensus, namely the agreement of equal interlocutors and the agreement of images of the world, it aims at a universalist abstraction. The exaltation of communicative action above other human practices is not grounded in any anthropology or psychology, ignoring the importance of emotions and the will to acknowledge. For example, we have no idea what would be the source of the obligatory power of the imperative of rational agreement, the power of agreed-​upon procedures that induce the individual to act morally. In other words, theories of communicative reason fail to resolve the dilemma contained in Taylor’s rhetorical question: Why should rational agreement have such high value to me that it would suspend the validity of other goals and interests? Second, these concepts are purely normative, as they abstract from the actual functioning of discourses. Their irenicism is a strenuous exorcism of what Marc Angenot calls “dialog of the deaf.” He argues that there is no single, “universal,

262 J.  Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press 1996, p. 140. 263 J.  Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Belknap Press 1999, p. 340. 264 Habermas is accused of this approach by Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1989, pp. 86–​87.

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transcendental, ahistorical Reason”265 that would establish the communication norm. The model dialog situation does not live up to the deliberative ideal. It is more like a conversation between Don Quixote and the merchants; each side believes and speaks following a different logic. This is caused by rhetorical cuts, which can be argumentative (inconsistency, divergence, lack of common rules of argumentation) and affective (shock, irritation, and hurt as reactions to the opponent’s arguments going beyond common sense), along with counterfactual reasoning and false enthymemes. Angenot distinguishes four types of ideal rhetorical strategies, with their peculiar argumentative rules and doxological requirements:  reactionary logic, immanentist-​instrumental logic, resentment-​ paranoid logic, and utopian-​gnostic logic. We may associate with them four doctrinal blocks:  conservatism, liberalism, populism and conspiracy theories, socialism. No insistent concordism will lead to the encounter of these blocks, and philosophers like Habermas are to be simply “moralists of rhetoric,”266 creators of regulative utopias. Indeed, in this view dissensus comes across as a source of danger to the community, a dangerous road that leads beyond politics (deliberative democracy) to naked violence. However, there is a significant current of thought that values dissensus, strongly linked to contemporary French theory. It includes Ranciére’s reflection and Mouffe’s agonistics or Badiou’s philosophy of the event. The three share the critical approach to the consensual management of societies, which they associate with a post-​political and posthistorical worldview and the neoliberal doctrine. According to Mouffe, neoliberalism is responsible for negating the agonistic dimension of social relations. The illusion of consensus  –​be it common or partial yet always referring to shared reasons –​pacifies disagreement and deprives public space of confrontational elements. It hinders processes of redefining the world and the self-​determination of the subject. In fact, consensus is a conceptual impossibility,267 which makes liberal democracy projects into unquantifiable figures. In turn, for Badiou consensus means universal agreement that our societies will no longer evolve, that the combination of capitalism in economics and parliamentary democracy in politics is the only solution. This consensus transforms conflicts into clashes of civilizations, struggles between

265 M.  Angenot, Dialogues de sourds. Traité de rhétorique antilogique, Paris: Mille et Une Nuits 2008, p. 15. Fr. “dialogue de sourds” … “une universelle, transcendentale et anhistorique Raison.” 266 Angenot, Dialogues de sourds, p. 146. 267 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 98.

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modern people and barbarians, enables wars and the refinement of police surveillance, but it denies the possibility of politics.268 Rancière locates these issues exclusively on the second semantic level. Consensus does not mean a state of the world in which everyone agrees with each other  –​in neither of the two basic variants of this diagnosis. It is not that an all-​powerful system, as oppressive as it is invisible, has effectively pacified minds and bodies. Nor is it that great passions and ideals have given way to orchestrated narcissistic satisfactions. Consensus does not mean an agreement between people but a reconciliation of meaning with itself: a reconciliation between the sensory regime of the representation of things and how we interpret their meaning. The consensus that is managing our aisthesis is as much a machine of power as it is a machine of vision. The repeated proclamations of the end of utopia, the end of history, and the end of human are arguments designed to convince us that we have freed ourselves from spectral excesses to possess mature wisdom: that, from now on, there is only that which is (CT viii). The elimination of conditions for dissensus neutralizes politics. There is a multiple reduction: potential subjects of action become parts of society, people –​ populations, conflicts –​negotiated differences, and demos becomes ethnos. The essence of consensus, by contrast, does not consist in peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement, as opposed to conflict or violence. Its essence lies in the annulment of dissensus as separation of the sensible from itself, in the nullification of surplus subjects, in the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body and of the political community to the relations between the interests and aspirations of these different parts. Consensus consists, then, in the reduction of politics to the police (DOP 42).

Politics is abolished in the consensus in two complementary forms: political action becomes jammed between the state police of governance and the world police of humanitarianism. In the latter case, politics is abolished under the figure of ethics (D 136–​137). Rancière explores the manifestations of this double reduction of politics to police and to ethics in his book Chronicles of Consensual Times, which is a collection of articles published over ten years in the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo. From the wars in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf through domestic politics in France and the presidential election to disaster cinema and discussions around representations of the Holocaust, Rancière explores the conditions for excluding politics from the public space –​this excess, threat to the existing order, dangerous “dirty thing” that should be dealt with by specialists, 268 A. Badiou, F. Tardy, La Philosophie et l’événement. Entretiens, Paris:  Germina 2010, p. 13.

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not people “off the street” (CT 71). Rancière argues that the blurring of boundaries between parties to a dispute blocks the emergence of antagonism and poses a threat to democracy. However, it is not just about the side effects of staged unanimity. Consensual police deliberately upholds the feeling of insecurity to manage fear and hatred. In essence, it is a technique for administering emotions. The unity that it projects is always directed against the imagined other, who becomes the object of hatred. This is all the easier because once the demos is erased, ethnos always appears on the surface. Egalitarian community disappears behind the homogeneous identity upheld by nationalism. In this optic, consensus does not mean the pacification of spirits and bodies. New forms of war, racism, ethnic cleansing, and terror are situated at the heart of consensual times. In spaces of locked dispute, tanks and bombs must mark the boundaries and consensus itself becomes a tool for designing “maps of war operations” (CT viii), namely the drawing up of such a topography of the visible and the possible onto which war and peace can be freely applied. This is about the constant demarcation between the world of liberal democracy and the space of pre-​civilizational chaos and naked violence. The political scientists, historians, and philosophers who since the early 1990s have tried to develop a new formula of fin de siècle also play a part in this work. For them, the funeral rite usually performed at the end of a century was combined with the general conviction that all the crimes of the twentieth century were rooted in one fundamental thoughtcrime: belief in the purposefulness of history (CT 8–​9). They saw it as their task to establish an exotic distance from a time when people believed in History and from areas of different temporality, still immersed in this barbaric belief, lagging behind civilizational vanguard. Rancière distinguishes two kinds of visions of the end of History. The first one is established by a Hegelian-​influenced discourse according to which history has reached its goal and fulfilled itself in the form of a universal State. The second one is provided by a resentful discourse on the ends of emancipatory illusions, supported by social science and hasty historical diagnoses. We may easily find the model of the Hegelian discourse about the end of history in the works of Francis Fukuyama, especially since he directly points to this tradition. Fukuyama’s most famous work from 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, begins with an enthusiastic observation: seemingly all-​powerful dictatorships have collapsed, strong liberal democracies are flourishing, and free-​market economic principles are spreading across the globe, resulting in an unprecedented increase in wealth. The Western world has not noticed this triumphal march of freedom and wealth, because it fell to pessimism, otherwise understandable after the twentieth-​century experience of totalitarianisms, wars,

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genocides, and arms race. Nevertheless, Fukuyama insists that it is high time to abandon this distorting cliché. If we take off the black glasses, we are to witness an unprecedented triumph of the best model of democracy in history –​a model for which there is no longer any alternative: The apparent number of choices that countries face in determining how they will organize themselves politically and economically has been diminishing over time. Of the different types of regimes that have emerged in the course of human history, from monarchies and aristocracies, to religious theocracies, to the fascist and communist dictatorships of this century, the only form of government that has survived intact to the end of the twentieth century has been liberal democracy. … Today, by contrast, we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.269 Contemporaries interpret Fukuyama’s work as a diagnosis of the triumph of liberalism after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the fiasco of the communist alternative. Rancière’s objection is part of a wave of criticism leveled against Fukuyama, often based on simplifications and misunderstandings. As Peter Sloterdijk rightly states, Fukuyama’s argument was quickly reduced to a new version of Yankee ideology, grew into a running gag of a political column, and became the object of neorealist malice.270

The latter consist in ironically asking whether we are really willing to believe that nothing at all –​or at least nothing important –​will happen in the future. Rancière comes closest to constructive criticism of Fukuyama that has ever stemmed from the milieu of the New Left. Ralph Miliband indicates that capitalist democracy resembles a simulacrum of democracy in that it is subject to two opposing drives: capitalist distinction, which singles out a relatively small group of possessors who control the means of production and communication, and the democratic logic of redressing inequality. On the other hand, just as capitalist democracy is not fully democratic so is none of its “systemic alternatives,” be it in the form of the Soviet Union or other “real socialist” states. Miliband proposes to abandon the discourse of epochal cuts and synchronous conflicts of systems to replace it with a progressive, socialist “politics of survival,” free from illusions of the end of history, geared to preparing a social revolt.271 269 F.  Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press 1992, pp.  45–​46. 270 P.  Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. M. Wenning, New York: Columbia University Press 2010, p. 39. See After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, ed. T. Burns, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 1994. 271 R.  Miliband, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, London–​New York: Verso Books 1994, pp.  177–​179.

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Moreover, Rancière emphasizes the internal contradictions of democracy and its conflict with the capitalist system. He disagrees with the posthistorical diagnosis and the shift of emphasis from emancipatory politics to political psychology. In Rancière’s reading, the discourse of the end of history is but one of many discourses of the end of utopia, which as such establishes a new utopia, meaning an ideal harmony between social equilibrium and the demands of law (MP 31). Fukuyama functions here as a bête noire, at the cost of a certain under-​reading or deliberate marginalization of the key thread of the psychological and metaphysical will to recognition, conceptualized after Hegel (as interpreted by Kojève). Thymos is an enduring element of human nature, namely the proud side of the human personality, indifferent to material goods, demanding that others recognize our worth or dignity. Thymos harbors values and tends to “seek justice,” making it capable of genuine fanaticism, obsession, and hate. It constitutes, as Fukuyama deduces, the main object of correction by liberal democracy, which displaces earlier moral and cultural horizons, seeking to replace the irrational desire for recognition –​especially the megalothymia of rulers –​with reasoned calculation and rational desire. Liberal democracy seeks to unify traditional cultures and replace organic moral communities with their languages of “good and evil” to establish a new community based on democratic values: participation, rationality, laicity, mobility, empathy, tolerance.272 The End of History and the Last Man ends on a similar, cautiously optimistic note: “the desire for recognition can take a variety of irrational forms before it is transformed into universal and equal recognition, such as those represented under the broad rubrics of religion and nationalism.”273 According to Sloterdijk, who proposes his model of thymotics in Rage and Time, this means that streams of discontent will always undermine triumphant liberal democracies, and all those affected by envy and frustration will blame their misfortunes not only on the winners but also on the rules of the game itself. Outbreaks of violence on the international stage do not mark a new beginning in history, while global terrorism is a thoroughly posthistorical phenomenon in which the anger of the excluded is staged in a theater of violence using the infotainment industry of democracy.274 At this point, we reach the most important bone of contention. Fukuyama believes that the meaning of the past is determined by history: “single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples

272 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 29. 273 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 207. 274 Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, pp. 41–​43.

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in all times.”275 If we supplement it with the conviction that the evolution of society’s forms has its finale, then we arrive at a vision of the end of history. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida shows that the deep scheme of this concept is established by Christian eschatology. The End of History or the Last Man resembles a new fiery gospel announcing the death of Marxism and the fulfillment of a specifically interpreted Hegelian scheme. It does so at the expense of inscribing all the monstrosities of modern history into the order of empiricism and their separation from ideal purposiveness; from the scheme of salvation oriented toward the triumph of liberal democracy.276 Rancière deconstructs the teleological vision of History yet prefers to see it as a sign of the times. He views Fukuyama as one of the apostles of a radically secular epoch in which secularized “politics” enters a new dimension of temporality, namely one devoid of the telos of community, uncut by promise, henceforth regarded as the source of all evil. In the eternal present –​in which from now on will happen the illusion-​less game of interests and affects  –​the past resembles a nightmare from which one has managed to wake up, and the future appears only as a simple extension of the “now.” This is the work that political thought has done for two centuries: it has brought to thought conclusion the revolution that removed the king figure from politics –​and then destroyed the revolutionary character of that destruction only to enter “a homogeneous time, a temporality relieved at last of the double royalty of past and future” (OS 6). This is how the posthistorical presence looks, constantly absorbing past and future, which François Hartog calls presentism277 and Rancière calls “frustrated positivism,” reinforcing itself as we lose our sense of “time driven by a process of unveiling the truth and a promise of justice”.278 The new narrative of historical necessity copies and parodies patterns familiar from past emancipatory discourses: One can see how the old Marxist arguments of economic necessity, the necessity of breaking through the old barriers, were actually taken up by capitalism, by the ruling classes and the ruling ideology, to say that there’s an inescapable necessity: the necessity of the free market, the absolute power of the market (PA 92).

275 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. xii. 276 J.  Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris: Gaileé 1993, pp. 97–​98. 277 F. Hartog Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris: Seuil 2003, p. 216. 278 J. Rancière, Les temps modernes. Art, temps, politique, Paris: La fabrique éditions 2018, pp.  15–​16.

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The second radically posthistorical narrative is based on the discourse about the end of emancipatory illusions and comes in two basic versions:  sociological and philosophical (which in turn breaks down into conservative-​anti-​utopian, leftist-​ironic, and leftist-​melancholic; for more, see the chapter “Enchanted Circle”). Let us focus for a moment on the sociological version. A considerable number of postmodern thinkers regale their readers with diagnoses of a “dispersed community,” devoid of structure and yet  –​like swarms279  –​maintaining cohesion and a definite direction of movement. Because of historical experience, collectivities organized themselves according to new principles. They have rejected dreams of unity (from mathesis universalis to political utopias), opting instead for an anti-​total/​-​totalitarian option that combats monopolies of knowledge and power. They entered a state of radical pluralism and constructed a new form of democracy, which is no longer an organizational form for consensus but for the dissensus of claims and rights. The vector of suspicious thought (Lyotard’s casus) is reversed: the critical figures of the end of ideology, of the democracy as a bazaar, and the primacy of consumption transformed into positive figures of a new order. This order crystallizes around the new imperative of pluralist society: the pursuit of narcissistic self-​ fulfillment (OS 59). This diagnosis is not only naively irenic but also based on false premises. First, due to the increasing polarization of wealth and poverty, one must reject the thesis of a homogenization of opportunities and needs of the inhabitants of the postmodern, wonderful world. Second, democracy has by no means been depoliticized to become “the natural habitat of postmodern individualism, no longer imposing struggles and sacrifices in sharp contradiction with the pleasures of the egalitarian age” (OS 22). The point is that democracy –​which is a supplement to the social –​cannot be reduced to the state of society. A perfect example of such an annihilation of politics is the sociological thought of Giles Lipovetsky who focuses on describing processes of personalization whose spread actually means “a rupture with the inaugural phase of modern societies, democraticc-​disciplinary, universalist-​rigorist, ideological-​ coercive.”280 The postmodern society based on the flow of information and unlimited stimulation of needs emerged at the dawn of a new era, namely the era of consumption. The watershed event was 1968, which had a modern (revolution)

279 Z. Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World, trans. L. Bauman, Cambridge: Polity Press 2011, p. 55. 280 G.  Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain, Paris: Gallimard 2009, p. 10.

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and a postmodern face (hedonism). Later, the class struggle stabilized, individualization liberated human actions from the shackles of holistic logics and grand emancipatory projects; even violence, unwarranted and banal, lined up with other illicit pleasures such as drugs.281 The new era is characterized by the extension of the reign of consumption into the private sphere, which is “consumption of one’s own existence through multiplied media.”282 We witnessed dismantling of the old systems of meaning, which encourages an expansion of individualism, an aversion to all uniformity, and a search for small satisfactions in a decentralized space of entertainment and self-​fashioning. The world has reorganized itself around seduction techniques. The latter has nothing to do with false representation or alienation of consciousness, as it constructs a sphere of multiplied choice, the self-​fashioning of free individuals: “Freed from the ghetto of superstructure and ideology, seduction became a dominant social relationship, a principle of global organization of the societies of abundance.”283 Systemic seduction extends to entertainment, media, information, fashion, even politics and the marketplace of ideas. Another name for this transition –​from limited individualism to total individualism –​is “narcissism.” Four years before Lipovetsky’s L’ère du vide (1983), Christopher Lasch placed this concept at the center of his sociological reflection. He argues that the struggle for recognition (good name) turned into a struggle for admiration (glamor), that the goal of action is no longer good name but fame and the envy of others, that pride in one’s achievements has been replaced by infinite vanity.284 Lipovetsky repeats these theses and builds on them a vision of the “last revolution,” a realized historical necessity. The psychologization of the social and the political, the subjectivization of all activities, the equation of socialization with desocialization –​jointly mean the beginning of the culture of narcissism, which is the long-​awaited achievement of the state of social homeostasis. This change seems irreversible because it crowns the secular aim of democratic societies …. The postmodern society, the society that generalizes the process of personalization in rupture with the modern disciplinary-​coercive organization, in some way realizes –​in the daily life itself and by new strategies –​the modern ideal of individual autonomy.285

Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide, pp.  313–​314. Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide, p. 16. Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide, p. 26. Ch.  Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W. W. Norton and Company 1979, pp. 59–​60. 2 85 Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide, pp. 21 and 36.

281 282 283 284

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This whole narrative fits into the scheme of “blessed catastrophe.” On the one hand, late modernity (postmodernity) appears here as the domain of the end, the fall of overarching projects that have organized history so far. Lipovetsky is fond of repeating:  deactivation of meanings, extinction of affects, disarmament and demobilization, liberation of spaces from their former functions and their transformation into lofts, decompression, desertion, indifference to truth, illogicality, desacralization of the Master discourse, ludic parody, and hedonism. Late-​twentieth-​century person is the last human ideally suited to Nietzsche’s famous description: she dismisses great questions by shrugging her shoulders and looking contemptuously, work is entertainment for her, she mocks everything, she says that the world of the past was mad, she jumps across a shrunken globe and diminutizes everything, she carefully engages in self-​care, believing that she invented happiness. On the other hand, this vision joins the secularized scheme of salvation: “the last man” puts an end to the madness of history, marked by slavery and crime. This image assumes the form of a new gospel: “God is dead, the great goals are no more, but nobody cares, that is the joyful news, that is the limit of Nietzsche’s diagnosis.”286 In proclaiming this good news, Lipovetsky goes even beyond Baudrillard’s formula of “nihilism of transparency and fluidity,” especially beyond the melancholy that accompanies “the disappearance of meaning” and “the volatilization of meaning.”287 Lipovetsky’s sociological essays marginalize the persuasive dimension of consumer society. There is no room here either for reflection on the personality forming or for thinking about the commodification of consumer relations, in which the consumer herself becomes the product, while what she considers the materialization of inner truth is in fact an idealization of the objectified traces of consumer decisions. There is no contradiction here between hedonism, economic necessity, and political equality. The processes of personalization, increase in prosperity, and the flourishing of democratic pluralism themselves negotiate their positions. Narcissism, abundance, and post-​egalitarian indifference co-​create a democracy of cool. The fact that Lipovetsky renames postmodernity as hypermodernity in his later work does not change much, because he still describes it in terms of the culmination of civilizational process, the

286 Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide, p. 52. 287 J.  Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994, p. 162.

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reconciliation of contradictions, the joyful agreement of the demands of technoscience, democracy, the market, and human rights.288 For Rancière, the good news of postmodern sociology provides a model example of the reduction of politics to the condition of the society. Lipovetsky’s hedonistic, sovereign individual who lives in a self-​service society is essentially the same alienated consumer as the one analyzed by David Riesman in the 1960s and by Jean Baudrillard in the 1970s. The novelty of this approach boils down to a simple trick: to constantly suggest the a priori thesis that the processes of personalization, consumption, and democracy have orchestrated themselves in recent decades to such an extent that they cooperate in the work of emancipating the individual. Riesman’s “other-​directed man”289 transforms into the new narcissist. The false promises of consumption that Baudrillard argues are masking “the absence of democracy and the non-​existence of equality”290 are now presented as a harmony of individual satisfaction and democratic order. In this trivial narrative, democracy is a world liberated from institutional forms, requiring no negotiation, a world of interpersonal relations reduced to a commonality of pleasures. Rancière summarizes Lipovetsky’s dissertation as follows: Such scholarly analyses are echoed in the banal themes of the pluralist society, where commercial competition, sexual permissiveness, world music and cheap charter flights to the Antipodes quite naturally create individuals smitten with equality and tolerance of difference. A world where everyone needs everyone else, where everything is permitted so long as it is on offer as individual pleasure and where everything is jumbled together is proposed to us as a world of self-​pacified multiplicity. Reason is supposed to flower here in its least vulnerable form: not as discipline forever threatened by transgression and delegitimation, but as a rationality produced by development itself, as a consensual deregulation of the passions (OS 22–​23).

Let us pay attention to how these two conflicting vocabularies form. On the one hand appear concepts that should arouse distrust or anxiety yet carry a positive value mark (plurality, transgression, delegitimization, differentiation, dissensus), while on the other hand, terms as if taken out of the correct 288 See  G. Lipovetsky, Le Crépuscule du devoir: l’éthique indolore des nouveaux temps démocratiques, Paris:  Gallimard 2000; G. Lipovetsky, Les Temps hypermodernes, Paris: Grasset 2004; G. Lipovetsky, Le Bonheur paradoxal: essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation, Paris: Gallimard 2009. 289 D.  Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven: Yale University Press 2020, part I, chs. IV–​VI. 290 J.  Baudrillard, The Consumer Society:  Myths and Structures, trans. C. Turner, London: Sage 1998, p. 50.

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public discourse (pluralism, metissage, tolerance, rationality, development, self-​ regulation), which are negatively characterized by the context. It is all about context; this progressive vocabulary functions within a consensual discourse that effectively blocks all politics. Indeed, where conflict disappears, the “postmodern logic of difference” does not triumph; instead, there emerge conditions for the return of archaic hatred of the other. Rancière seems to follow Freud’s late writings in indicating that culture “has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s  aggressive  instincts” through reactive psychic formations.291 Permissiveness, relaxation, and acceptance do not fit into the economy of pleasure; instead of tolerance, they generate negation of the other, which in turn leads to “the return of the pre-​political hatred amid chants of post-​political wisdom.”292 The only remedy for such a return of the displaced is politics, but neither the politics that we identify with the media theater of representative democracy nor the politics that –​as Lipovetsky approvingly argues –​became popular entertainment that engages crowds of contemporary narcissists as much as weather forecasts or sports.293 In the perspective established by Rancière, all this is no politics, but its substitute subjected to sociological reduction. Nor is it “pure politics” in Arendt’s sense, meaning a revolutionary practice introducing a new order into reality, separated from the economic and the private, nor a separate sphere of activity to be defended against external threats: ideology, nationalism, technology, but also democracy.294 Rancière even goes so far as to say that: “The “end of politics” and the “return of politics” are two complementary ways of cancelling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of the state apparatus. “Consensus” is the common name given to this cancellation)” (POA 42). Any tendency aiming to cancel the dissensus carries with it a similar double threat: it leads to the necrosis of police order and then uncontrollable eruptions of anger that was never embodied in subjective political activity. This is a very important element in Rancière’s whole thought construction, because as I will elaborate later below, politics produces eccentric subjects, introduces error into the communal calculus, meaning it simultaneously disrupts the police order and invents active forms for affects.

291 S. Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey, W. W. Norton and Company 1962, p. 59. 292 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 8. Fr. “Le retour de la haine pré-​politique au milieu des choeurs de la sagesse post-​politique.” 293 Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide, p. 56. 294 See B. Crick, In Defense of Politics, London: Continuum 2005.

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Notably, both Lipovetsky and Lyotard were members of the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie led by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, which briefly included also Guy Debord. Founded in 1948, the group promoted an anti-​dogmatic, anti-​Stalinist Marxism, seeing the Soviet Union and its satellite countries as examples of state capitalism and a system of oppression led by a new bureaucratic elite. This formation went through many crises, but the most important one happened in 1963, when a group of dissenters emerged. This was the last element in a series of ideological disputes: the intellectual formation had its origins in the break with the Trotskyist International Communist Party (1948), then came the disputes of 1951, which ended with the departure of several militants, the secession of 1959 (announced, among others, by Claude Lefort and Henri Simon, who founded Informations et liaisons ouvrières), and finally the schism of 1963, linked to Lyotard’s departure. Until the formation’s self-​dissolution in 1967, disputes continued over the strategy of revolutionary action. However, their profound theme remained that of their relationship to Marxism, from which Castoriadis increasingly distanced himself.295 During his two-​year-​long activity in Pouvoir Ouvrier, Lyotard defended the purity of the revolutionary idea against its socialist dilution, only to then declare with the fervor of a disappointed lover the failure of all emancipatory aspirations. At the same time, Castoriadis tried to think through the theoretical problem of abolishing the division between the people and the class of leaders, along with the practical questions of worker self-​organization and bottom-​up politics in general. Castoriadis stresses that any representative system leads only to bureaucratic drift, which is also true of the so-​called communist countries: The monstrous history of Marxism-​Leninism shows what an emancipatory movement cannot and should not be. In no way does it allow us to conclude that the capitalism and the liberal oligarchy under which we now live embody the finally resolved secret of human history. The project of total mastery (which Marxism-​Leninism took from capitalism and which, in both cases, was turned into its contrary) is a delusion.296

These words, written in 1990, are a simultaneous indictment of both capitalism and communism as rigid oligarchic systems. They reject the dream of total control over social multiplicity and the dream of the end of history. Instead, they raise the continuing relevance of the emancipatory project, which draws its

295 See Ch. Premat, “Les Scissions internes au groupe “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” Dissidences 6/​2009, pp. 137–​147. 296 C. Castoriadis, “The Pulverisation of Marxism-​Leninism,” in: C. Castoriadis World in Fragments, trans. D. A. Curtis, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997, p. 68.

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strength from the simultaneous struggles of individuals. However, Castoriadis devotes much energy to conceive of an institutional framework that would enable individual political empowerment. Rancière is relatively close to Castoriadis  –​and certainly much closer to him than the schismatics of Socialisme ou barbarie, who turned away from the “marching column” to the apotheosis of the “swarm” –​but only in certain areas. Rancière himself foregrounds the need to give the democratic formula a “radical momentousness,” which is similar for both philosophers, but he simultaneously names a fundamental difference. While Castoriadis philosophizes in terms of great institutions that provide framework for action, Rancière is content with a series of paradoxes: the subject is born out of the rupture of established identity relations, in the gap that separates her from herself; the people are distinct from one another as the sum of their parts; equality is not the source of the political act nor its goal but an initial assumption renewed and sustained by action itself (ETP 241–​242). This last difference seems fundamental –​and it represents the most subversive idea in the domain of political philosophy. Forsaking reflection on institutions distorts the profound logic of this domain of philosophy –​the logic that politics is the art of governing a community, of transforming democracy (as a collective way of life) into law. This inversion leads to two key counter-​ principles:  first, politics is “a dissensual form of human activity, an exception to the rule of gathering and governing groups of people;” second, democracy is “such a mode of subjectification that enables the appearance of political subjects.”297 *** It might seem that the above argument has separated us from the realm of imagination inhabited by Max Jacob and his kind. Seemingly, we have found ourselves on the antipodes of the free interplay of signs and images, on the side of historical necessity and social determinants. However, these are but appearances. Rancière persuades us to recognize the poetic-​political continuum. On the one hand, social processes are not governed by any “inexorable logic,” for they are founded on a multiplicity of contingent subjectifications of these “literary animals” that submit themselves to the seductive power of words. The social processes

297 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 12. Fr. “La politique n’est pas l’art de diriger les communautés, elle est une forme disensuelle de l’agir humain, une exception aux règles selon lesquelles s’opèrent le rassemblement et le commandement des groupes humains. La démocratie n’est ni une forme de gouvernement, ni un style de vie sociale, elle est le mode de subjectivation par lequel existent des sujets politiques.”

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are not even governed by “peculiar laws,” because they are subject to the logic of metaphor and metonymy, established in the aesthetic regime of art (M 12). On the other hand, literature –​often despite what individual writers state –​is never an autonomous and abstract entity, meaning self-​referential and detached from a common sensorium. The material of literature remains language, which contains both petrified distributions of the sensible and the potential for their transformation. It is not simply a question of artistic imagination dismantling ossified rationality. Rancière is accused of lacking in his thought the category of imagination, without which dissensus remains pure abstraction. Joseph Tanke attempts to supplement this philosophy with his theory of imagination as a trans-​subjective force, a social ability to activate new sensible worlds through egalitarian relations with others.298 Others remark on the possibility to annex the concept of imagination as the first mental power developed by Castoriadis. In fact, Castoriadis distinguishes between primary/​radical imagination and secondary/​combinatory or reproductive imagination. He argues that philosophers, including Freud, deal exclusively with the latter, while it is the former that lies at the center of the social world. Primary imagination is prior to perception and memory, and even prior to desire. It is the human-​impersonal (l’humain-​impersonnel) by which a community is transformed into a collective. It is the vis formandi, the creating power immanently attributed to human gatherings.299 Through its continuous work, every society is not only instituted (institué) as accomplished history, the result of past events, but it is also self-​instituting (instituant). The meanings communicated are neither real nor rational but produced by the power of the first imagination, which thus also becomes the social imagination (l’imaginaire social). However, the above idea seems irreconcilable with Rancière’s thought. First, Castoriadis operates on the assumption of social coherence. For him, society is a separate world, enclosed and meaningful, made coherent by the confrontation with external chaos such as nature, chance, or lack of order.300 Here, Rancière recognizes the multiplicity of divisions and the completely different individual and group worlds delineated by them, along with the plethora of incommensurable temporalities. Second, Rancière rejects any anthropological foundations of

298 J.  Tanke, Jacques Rancière: An Introduction, London: Continuum 2011, p. 162. 299 C.  Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la société, Paris: Seuil 1981, p. 148; C. Castoriadis Figures du pensable, Paris: Seuil 1999, p. 94. 300 See A. Tomès, Castoriadis. L’imaginaire, le rationel et le réel, Paris:  Démopolis 2015, p. 45.

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his theory; he foregrounds no primordial human capacities; he does not reason in terms of source powers (in which reasoning itself becomes entangled in the logic of suspicion and devolution). In the blank space that is so troubling to some exegetes, there appears politics understood as pure potentiality: the possibility of an innovative alignment of perception and meaning. It situates itself prior to the act of any narrative or imaginative imaging. If we now return to Max Jacob’s literary piece “The Beggar of Naples,” we discover a remarkable and somewhat problematic thing:  the anecdote situates imagination on the side of routine, blindness, and absence! After all, the aristocrat only imagined the beggar! The distributions of the sensible underlying his mistake preserves social divisions (class, gender), as the power of imagination only reinforces the permanence of these divisions. The impulse comes from somewhere else. It is sensory experience that suddenly, for some unknown reason, has paved its way into the protagonist’s consciousness, forcing him to verify his perfunctory worldview, shattering the illusory identity of places and people (the object standing in front of the palace door must be a beggar), questioning thoughtless self-​identification and the ensuing patterns of action (since it is a beggar, my duty, as a wealthy man, is to give alms). The silent presence of this “wooden box painted green” becomes a scandal, forcing us to correct the cognitive map or to what David Panagia calls “somacognition:” a preconscious, pre-​reflective, and pre-​imaginary opening to the world.301 Thus, Jacob’s poem reveals the presence of things usually covered by perceptual routine, but it also reveals the enigmatic permanence and fluidity of the sensible, the eternally renewing configuration of senses and the sensoric. This short prose poem stages that in which we all share:  the distribution of the sensible. Slicing the world with metonymy and metaphors. Bringing the subject to life, drawing boundaries, and inventing communities. Rethinking this process is the most serious intellectual challenge in our time, the age of consensus that in various ways attempts to cover the intolerable scandal of politics.

301 Panagia, The Political Life, p. 10.

III Scandal! And as he spoke, I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into. Back in Jersey, he ascribes the stress that he was convinced had culminated in the coronary artery disease to the humiliating failure of nerve that had prevented him from leaving South Orange for Basel; in Judea his diagnosis is just the opposite –​here he attributes the disease to the insidious strain of Diaspora abnormality manifested most blatantly by “the original Jewish dream of escape... Switzerland with the beloved shiksa.” –​Philip Roth, The Counterlife302

Annulling Politics The etymology of the word “scandal” leads us to Greek skándalon (σκάνδαλον), which means “a trap, an ambush, a snare.” As René Girard303 writes, to scandalize means become “an obstacle in one’s path.” On the other hand, skándalon originates from either skolon, “a trap,” or from skadzein, “to limp.” This word appears multiple times in the Bible as a term for “a hindrance on the road” (Leviticus 19:1–​14; Judges 2:3), but also “sin, the breaking of taboo” (Judges 7–​8; Judith 5:20). The Latin scandalum consolidates this original meaning: the Vulgate holds a fragment in which the word means “the cause of a spiritual fall,” an “obstacle” over which Peter stumbles out of fear for Jesus’s fate (Matthew 16:23). Later, the word was subject to a characteristic semantic drift: meaning from “malicious gossip” and ”calumny” (in the Old English scandal) through “unworthy, dishonorable actions” to even the “cause of affront or outrage.” Today, the lexeme scandal means “public sensation connected with transgressing existing norms,” but it also functions as a term for “something difficult to understand, contradicting the categories with which we operate,” as in the case of the expressions “the scandal of evil” or “the scandal of death.” In this sense, scandal means as much a break from the rule as cognitive dissonance.

302 Ph. Roth, The Counterlife, New York: Vintage Books 1996, pp. 124–​125. 303 R.  Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Y. Freccero, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1986, p. 157.

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Both present meanings of the word –​the primary “violation of order and the related outrage” and the secondary “something that eludes understanding” –​stem from the same transgressive movement: the revealing, questioning, and overstepping of borders or the expanding of the scale of experience by going beyond the existing order (of law, custom, or reason). This determines the paradoxical character of everything that is scandalous, because its positivity disallows separation from the original prohibition. Scandal as a disturbance and breakdown is ephemeral, its effect –​unpredictable: it can fade away and disappear, leaving no trace except for a handful of stories and memories, but it can also contribute to a permanent change, to the transformation of law, custom, common sense, or sensitivity. According to Rancière, the greatest scandal of our time –​the irremovable and permanent scandal of our coexistence  –​is politics and its proper regime:  democracy. Their inappropriateness is so unacceptable that... we invented “political philosophy.” This term defines a set of mental operations aimed at abolishing or concealing the scandal of thinking proper to politics. What transgressive and scandalous characteristics do I mean? “This theoretical scandal is nothing more than the rationality of disagreement. What makes politics an object of scandal is that it is that activity which has the rationality of disagreement as its very own rationality” (D xii). Once again, we find ourselves in the domain of metonymies, defining different dimensions of the same phenomenon: disagreement (mésentente) –​ dissensus –​ politics –​democracy. At this point, let us ask again about the impossibility of political philosophy. Why, on principle, can it not grasp its object? According to the ninth thesis on politics, “the province of political philosophy lies in grounding political action in a specific mode of being,” and “it works essentially to efface the litigiousness constitutive of politics.” Indeed, “the distinguishing feature of politics is the existence of a subject who ‘rules’ by the very fact of having no qualifications to rule” (DOP 40). Neither diagnoses of the end of politics nor proclamations of the return of pure politics are of any help here; in both cases the source gesture is reproduced: the search for le propre of politics, the set of properties defining its specificity, setting it apart from the network of social and artistic practices. Another obstacle to conceiving politics as a momentary dimension of human activities is related to the growing popularity for the concept of power and its derivatives. Referring to Steven Lukes’s systematization, we may say that it is about a shift to a three-​dimensional theory of power.304 Lukes distinguishes

304 S.  Lukes, Power: A Radical View, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2005.

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three types of power theories, depending on their scope and capacity. One-​ dimensional theories view power as the institutional sovereignty of one subject over another, reducing it to decision-​making procedures and the formation of institutions. Two-​dimensional theories point to the important role of attitudes, beliefs, value systems, along with the procedures and rituals that protect the interests of certain social groups. On the other hand, in three-​dimensional theories, power appears to be present in all social interactions. The concept of “power” –​overly flexible, overly expansive in projecting subordination relations –​proves to be another discursive tool for annulling politics. It allows us to claim that everything is political if there are power relations everywhere. However, if everything is political  –​then nothing really is. Jean-​Luc Nancy defines this maxim as “perfectly neotheological:” it eliminates the gap in which operate politics and the multiplicity it affirms.305 Rancière reiterates that everything is police and that politics happens as a distortion to the division of space and time, roles and competencies. Nevertheless, we should rather say that “everything can be political,” that politics is the hidden potential of our co-​being. It is important to show, as Foucault did, that the police order extends far beyond specialized institutions and techniques. However, it seems equally important to show that nothing is political by itself, by being subject to practices of governance. A word or action becomes political only when it turns into ”police logic and egalitarian logic.” The same event –​an election, a protest, a demonstration, a reorganization of social relations, the establishment of a community, an artwork –​can recreate relations of dependency or open a space for politics (D 32). Political philosophy provides numerous techniques for reducing the rationality of disagreement. The earliest of these (with the Platonic model at the forefront) are based on inventing an ethology of community, projecting congruence between occupations, means of inhabiting space, and the law. Other techniques proclaim the falsity of politics or its end. However, the reduction of dissensus has a similar effect everywhere: it makes police and politics indistinguishable from one another (DOP 41). Rancière divides these annulling techniques into four basic groups, assigning each a generic name whose prefix indicates a particular type of thought reduction. Archipolitics. Archipolitics aims to fund the community on a single arché, following the integrating principle that precludes any surplus once the calculus is applied to the population. Žižek presents it as “the communitarian attempts to

305 J.-​L.  Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. P.-​ A. Brault and M. Naas, New York: Fordham University Press 2010, p. 21.

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define a traditional close, organically structured homogenous social space which allows for no void in which the political moment-​event can emerge” (POA 71). In this case, Plato’s archipolitics remains the archetype: the project of a community in which law is embodied in the customs, characters, and behavior of citizens, in which nomos exists as living logos and as ethos. This law may be based on a variety of initial premises –​ethnic, class, or religious (sometimes a mix of the three) –​but in each of these cases, the principle of contingent, egalitarian empowerment is replaced by the mythology of communal beliefs. Political excess and democratic laisser-​aller are displaced by the phantasmagorical coherence of the republican social body. Indeed, archipolitics is archipolice (D 68) that completely aligns ways of being and acting, ways of feeling and thinking. In the modern era, it transforms into a claim for a natural and organic national community, while in philosophy it assumes the form of deterministic sociology of social bonds. Parapolitics. For Rancière, parapolitics is a model of governance that transforms the actors participating in a dispute into participants of a public debate. Demos becomes an ordinary side of the conflict, and the conflict of two logics turns into a conflict of parties. Parapolitics accepts political conflict but turns it into a competition in the representative space between recognized subjects. Its model realization is Aristotle’s political project, which employs the principle of equality to institutionalize it in the form of fractional struggles. Its core remains the rationalist ethics and the deliberative model of coexistence (in the spirit of Habermas or Rawls), which assumes the will and possibility of agreement between partners (D 43), erasing the potentiality of antagonism and instead formulating principles to which one must conform, obviously so that –​to quote Žižek again –​“so that the agonic procedure of litigation does not explode into politics proper.”306 It neutralizes the rationality of disagreement inherent in democracy with the rationality of consensus. Parapolitics has triumphed in the last stage of Western history. It removes antagonisms and founds that model of democratic government with which people of the “free world” are familiar: its supreme virtue is the dispersion and passivity of the masses, its principle is the efficient management of desires, and its secondary function is the “serene end of politics” (D 75). The latter is linked to the search for the middle class, which is to foreshadow the future, conflict-​free

306 Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” p. 73. See also N. Doerr, “Between Habermas and Rancière: The Democracy of Political Translation,” trans. E. Doucette, Transversal 1/​ 2013.

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society. Once the strong status of the bourgeoisie is recognized as the basis of order, there occurs a depoliticization of politics using tools of the consensus. Conflict becomes an imperceptibly tamed component of the social structure, part of the police order. Postpolitics. Parapolitics seamlessly transforms into another technique of annulling dispute, whose name is well-​known: postpolitics. In this case, the conflict of ideological visions is replaced with a collaboration between enlightened technocrats and liberal multiculturalists. Consensus reigns, and it effectively aligns sense with sensibility, namely the sensory presence of things and how we interpret them. Consequently, we see the same things and understand them in the same way. We recognize that we live in non-​political communities in which ways of solving problems are indisputable, thus power must be placed in the hands of specialists. Postpolitics becomes post-​democracy if, according to Rancière, we identify democracy with politics proper; it is a regime of homogenized opinion with the visible, which is an imitation of democracy (its mimesis).307 This does not mean that postpolitics creates a space for the peaceful coexistence of the equal and the different. As Žižek writes, “the political (the space of litigation in which the excluded can protest the wrong/​injustice done to them), foreclosed from the symbolic then returns in the real, in the form of racism” (POA 72). Racism and all forms of hatred based on religion  –​or any kind of difference –​are not signs of backwardness or the return of the archaic. On the contrary, they are the other face of progress. In postpolitical times, hatred synchronizes with forms of legitimization set in motion by enlightened governments and reproduces dominant forms of description. The other –​the one with no stake in the symbolic order –​appears as an obstacle to the realization of own pleasure and becomes an object of extrapolitical passion (CT 12–​15). Critics of the postpolitics concept perceive it as a theoretical generalization indefensible in an era of widespread skepticism about the governance of experts, surveillance, and extensive invigilation. We witness no bolstering of expert knowledge, Jodi Dean writes, but the return of national imperialisms based on exclusionary categories of ethnos and faith. Meanwhile, the postpolitics described by Negri, Hardt, Agamben, Rancière, and Žižek is to be –​paradoxically –​a leftist fantasy of politics without politics, a dream to re-​enact class struggle in space cleared of antagonisms.308 Notably, contrary to this critique, Rancière rejects all

307 A. Joudaki, La politique selon l’égalité : essai sur Rancière, Gauchet, Clastres et Lefort, Paris: L’Harmattan 2016, pp. 131–​138. 308 J. Dean, “Politics without Politics,” in: Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, pp.  78–​79.

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forms of holistic fantasy such as the absolute disappearance of politics that is to encourage global revolution. In turn, he describes the interpenetration of various non-​political formulas: parapolitics constantly transforms into postpolitics while there reactively emerges the alternative, archipolitical response –​national, imperial, religious. In this coordinate system, politics acts as it once did, based on the principle of double revision (OS 14): the political reduction of the social (distribution of wealth) and the social reduction of the political (distribution of power). As such, politics remains in opposition to holistic systems of reconciliation (archipolitics), taming (parapolitics), and annihilation (postpolitics). However, politics persists within these systems and by no means disappears, continuously fueled by the irreducible principle of equality. Metapolitics. Dean’s fantasy most often fits into metapolitical categories. Metapolitics is an interpretation of politics from the viewpoint of police, which seeks to interpret heterology as an illusion, and spaces and gaps –​as signs of falsity.309 Meta-​politics approaches political issues as phenomena that  conceal “the real mechanisms of social life and the true forms of community” (FPA 18). It develops techniques of returning “the conditioned to the never-​ending series of its conditions or referring the surface to what lies underneath” (MDS 17),310 which are in fact ways to halt the political machinery of translation and interpretation and the pacification of singularity. In its purest form, metapolitics realizes in the concept of class struggle, which is the ultimate truth of the political lie. Marxism notices absolute harm in the organization of social life, recognizing it as the hidden truth of politics, so it seeks to denounce and abolish the latter. Marxism interprets the affairs of public life in terms of masking: these are the phenomena that conceal the true nature of events. They are sustained by the dominant ideology; this term describes the distance of words from things, always ready to transform into the falsehood of politics. Thus, metapolitics seeks to destroy democratic argumentation, because it doubts the repartition of the social body, the redistribution of wealth and power. Metapolitics is founded on relentless denunciation of inequality, error, and misdemeanor and on the logic of class antagonism positioned outside of politics.311 According to Žižek’s commentary, “the political conflict is

309 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 90. 310 Fr. “Le renvoi du conditionné à la série jamais achevée de ses conditions ou le renvoi de la surface a ce qui se cache en dessous.” 311 See B. Bosteels, “Archipolitics, Parapolitics, Metapolitics,” in: J.-​P. Deranty, Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, London and New York: Routledge 2010, pp. 80–​92; E. Renault,

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fully asserted, as a shadow-​theatre in which processes –​whose proper place is on Another Scene (the scene of economic infra-​structure) –​are played out; the ultimate goal of true politics is thus its self-​cancellation” (POA 71). The harm of metapolitics is not only that it often leads to an explosion of violence but also that it depoliticizes the entire space of the sensible; because it explains the stage through its backstage (hors-​scène; MDS 29), it blinds us to processes of constructing reality that occur on that stage. This typology is provisional and open to supplementation. For example, Žižek supplements the above list with “ultra-​politics,” that is “the attempt to depoliticize conflict by way of bringing it to an extreme” (POA 71). Following Rancière’s perspective, such ultra-​political processes would be epiphenomena of the four above orders, but this working systematization is not worth the hassle. The most important element remains conviction that proper politics does not fit into the above totalizations, because paths of political empowerment are not those of identification, as it is the other way around: the former are based on disidentification and impossible identification. The paths of political empowerment appear in countless variations in literature, which expands the lifeworld subjected to necessity with imaginative (but not fictional) counterlives. In literature, through it, and analogously to its stories, we repeatedly discover these counterlives, hidden in the womb of administered normality, ready to reveal themselves as soon as we decide against the police call that there indeed is “something to look at.”

Counterlives Counterlife is the title of a 1986 novel by Philip Roth, who serves as the go-​to scandalist in the USA. He breaks the rules of political correctness with pleasure and balances on the edge of pornography. Roth has worked long and persistently for this kind of label. He debuted with a collection of short stories Goodbye, Columbus (1959), bringing a critical portrait of American Jews, and a short story “Defender of the Faith,” that ignited a fury of Anti-​Defamation League of B’nai B’rith organization. Roth became famous for Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), considered by Gershom Scholem to be a dangerous book, “the book for which all anti-​Semites have been praying.”312 In his later works, Roth develops these early

“The Many Marx of Jacques Rancière,” in: Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene, pp.  167–​186. 3 12 As in C. R. Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013, p. 65.

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themes obsessively. It is often said that for more than half a century, he has been still writing one book: the story of the modern Jew, struggling against the oppression of tradition and religion, confronting the categorical call of ethnicity, trying to define his identity, and being sexually neurotic. Roth’s characters, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, Natan Zuckerman, or Neil Klugman, endlessly break free from family arrangements and fall into new relationships of dependence, struggle against hypocrisy, and entangle in lies. In Roth’s great epic oeuvre Counterlife constitutes a turning point, a supplement to the tetralogy collected under the name Zuckerman Bound  –​ consisting of the novels The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy –​and the beginning of a new cycle of novels, which starts with American Pastoral and ends with Exit Ghost. At first, everything looks similar: here is another tale of erectile dysfunction and problems with Jewish identity. We also find other tropes typical for Roth: self-​reflexivity, shifting narrative conventions, playing with autobiographical tropes. We meet here Nathan Zuckerman, a controversial figure, widely regarded as the author’s alter ego. However, the new in this novel lies in the ostentatious plethora of plot variants (although Roth has experimented with it before, in My Life as a Man, which starts with two made-​up autobiographies) and in the intriguing problematization of the life-​ story-​literature relationship. We learn about the parallel lives of two brothers, which form an astonishing pattern, interweaving and intertwining by coincidence or fate. Henry is a successful, middle-​class dentist who leads a “double life:” at home, he is an ideal husband and fulfilled father, at work, he is a passionate lover indulging his innermost fantasies with his assistant. When his heart medication makes him impotent, he faces a difficult choice: accept a stable, boring life without sex or opt for a dangerous operation. Terrified by the prospect of a life without passion, he chooses the latter and dies on the operating table. At his brother’s funeral, Nathan, a scandalous writer with a taste for breaking taboos, wonders what use he can make of the tragic and pathetic story of his brother, who had confided his secrets to him before his death. Devoid of any moral scruples, he writes down Henry’s story: a secularized Jew who fell victim to repressive patterns of male sexuality. Under his pen, Henry’s life becomes a mocking tale about the poverty of bourgeois life, about chance and destiny, and about Eros whose other face is Thanatos. However, in the second chapter, Roth makes a spectacular turn to interrupt the fast-​paced story by presenting an alternative version of events. Henry survives the surgery and undergoes an extraordinary transformation: he converts to Orthodox Judaism and takes the name Hanoch. He leaves his wife, children,

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and lover to travel to Israel and settle in the West Bank, where he becomes a follower of radical Zionism. When Nathan comes to him in the ambiguous role of his wife’s confidant and “messenger of normality” (meaning a secular model of life), he encounters different kinds of fanaticism. The fighters for Judean independence seek to radically reverse Jewish existence, to create “a counterlife that is one’s own anti-​myth.”313 Their fairy-​tale utopia built on war trauma and xenophobia brings to life a series of fantasies of racial purity, for instance assimilation presented as a second Holocaust, the vision of the coming Great Pogrom through which America will restore its racial purity. Nathan Zuckerman, this cynical, secularized Jew, is forced to confront his nation’s tribal epic. However, in the alternative version of events –​in another counterlife –​he settles down in England, where he encounters anti-​Semites disguised as left-​wing human rights activists, which is when he decides to reconstruct his Jewish identity. Moreover, Nathan allows himself this purely imaginary identification, although probably, like Roth, “growing up Jewish as I did and growing up American seemed to me indistinguishable.”314 In an earlier incarnation, Zuckerman directly states: My landscape wasn’t the Negev wilderness, or the Galilean hills, or the coastal plain of ancient Philistia; it was industrial, immigrant America-​Newark where I’d been raised, Chicago where I’d been educated, and New York where I was living in a basement apartment on a Lower East Side street among poor Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans. My sacred text wasn’t the Bible but novels translated from Russian, German, and French into the language in which I was beginning to write and publish my own fiction-​not the semantic range of classical Hebrew but the jumpy beat of American English was what excited me.315

As if this was not enough, in the next version of the plot, it is Nathan who has coronary artery disease and decides to have a bypass graft surgery because of love, which is the meaning of life for him. Unfortunately, he dies as a result of the procedure. On the other hand, while inspecting an abandoned apartment, his brother Henry finds the dead man’s notes: the history of his illness and romance, and his trip to Judea –​meaning previous chapters of Roth’s book –​and destroys them. In the first layer of the book, we find a tangled plot and traditional satire whose blade turns against all kinds of extremism that threaten freedom and diversity.

313 Roth, The Counterlife, p. 147. 314 Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013, p. 111. 315 Roth, The Counterlife, p. 53.

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Retreating from the role of commentator, Roth lets the characters speak, and in long tirades they spell out their views and make spectacular self-​compromises. Again and again, in this polyphonic construction, we read about strong, exclusionary narrative identities and myths of a new beginning. For example, when Nathan’s plane is returning from Israel, it is hijacked by an admirer of his prose who yells: “Israel needs no Hitlers for the right to be Israel! Jews need no Nazis to be the remarkable Jewish people! Zionism without Auschwitz! Judaism without victims! The past is past! We live!”316 In the radical demands of the hijacker we once again hear the Jewish anti-​myth: collective madness lined with traumas and fears. This time, it is expressed in the demand for a radical breach, in the belief that only after Yad Vashem is dismantled and the Shoah forgotten can a community be built. In the background of these tangled plots, we see the play of mirrors, the inert mechanics of an optical device that multiplies perspectives, generates fates and counterfates. Furthermore, we see how this mirror trompel’œil blurs the line between successive floors of fiction; for example, Henry censors his brother’s novel before throwing it away, and we do not know which version we have just read. It is difficult to say what is the truth of the fictional world and what is a fragment of one character’s unfinished work. Roth does not decide which version of events is trustworthy, he does not try to separate truth and fiction. In an interview, he describes the novelistic technique used in The Counterlife as follows: Normally there is a contract between the author and the reader that only gets torn up at the end of the book. In this book the contract gets torn up at the end of each chapter: a character who is dead and buried is suddenly alive, a character who is assumed to be alive is, in fact, dead, and so on. This is not the ordinary Aristotelian narrative.317

The term “nonaristotelian novel” reminds of Leonard Orr’s318 concept, who describes in this way a model of innovative, non-​chronological, non-​mimetic, autotelic prose. However, Roth refuses to be a literary prestidigitator and insists that The Counterlife is neither a modernist nor a postmodernist, nor even an avant-​garde  novel. Roth presents many versions of events that cannot be reconciled. In this way, he captures the complexity of a life that hates a black-​and-​white logic, which is

316 Roth, The Counterlife, p. 165. 317 Conversations with Philip Roth, ed. G. J. Searles, Jackson–​London: University Press of Mississippi 1992, p. 252. 318 L.  Orr, Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel, London–​Toronto: Bucknell University Press, Associated University Press 1991.

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not based on “either/​or” but on “both/​and.” As the characters wander through the garden of forking paths, they switch roles and become like one another. They try to define their identity, struggling with the oppression of tradition, family, and imposed social roles. The repeated cycle of ruptures and returns finds its counterpart in an internally contradictory, multivariant narrative. They lead parallel lives, which may lead us to believe that everyone leads both a life and a counterlife, that everyone is both a progressivist and a traditionalist, a cynic and a fanatic, a saint and a sinner. As Nathan Zuckerman says surprised: “The kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.”319 Philip Roth goes further than his novelistic alter ego and transcends the astonishment of the seemingly distanced spectator: he shows how our fictions turn into reality. Incidentally, this quotation serves as a motto for the only explicitly autobiographical book The Facts, which is a risky attempt to “transform myself into myself”320 after a hundred reveals of crypto-​autobiographical fiction. Paradoxically, the choices, behind which there is a strictly personal motivation (love, passion, curiosity), have a political character, meaning they are sovereign gestures bringing to life a free subject and its new self-​narrative. At the same time, the title Counterlife points to the Israeli theme of the novel; as such, it may describe the reversal of Jewish destiny, and the possibility of self-​ determination after centuries of living in the diaspora. However, this is where the danger lies, as illustrated by the monologs of characters obsessed with the idea of identity. In their demented tirades, there is –​as Rancière says –​“a dream, of the community as a body united by some principle of life (love, fraternity or work) having currency among the members of that body or serving as a yardstick in the distribution of functions within it” (OS 88). By persistently seeking a defined subject of political action or generating its compulsive projections, the characters are in fact dreaming of the best possible police. In doing so, they annihilate the potentiality of politics –​sporadically appearing in their biographies –​as a series of contingent and unstable subjectivities entangled in a multi-​variant choice. They set out in search of the lost “people” and lose their freedom along the way. This leads them to voluntarily renounce their sovereignty: “Me is somebody I have forgotten –​ Henry/​Hanoch clarifies. –​ Me no longer exists out here. There isn’t time for me, there isn’t need of me –​here Judea counts, not me!”321

319 Roth, The Counterlife, p. 111. 320 Roth, The Facts, p. 8. 321 Roth, The Counterlife, p. 105.

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As many others, the characters confuse politics with police and fail to recognize the internal contradiction embedded in the “free community” taking the form of a paradox: the property of démos is freedom that is not determinable at all (D 7).

À la Recherche du Peuple Perdu The philosophical thought of the last hundred and several decades is constantly searching for “lost people.” Let me add at once that the above wordplay is not original; Proust’s phrase has been used countless times in studies on this subject. In 2011, a book À la recherche du peuple perdu was published. We may treat it as a symptom of a certain disorder of political philosophy.322 The book’s author, Ivan Rioufol, is a neo-​reactionary (as he calls himself) publicist of  Le Figaro. Put bluntly, he is one of those unruly publicists who pride themselves in their political incorrectness. Opposed to feminism, anti-​racism, and the dictatorship of tolerance, he has recently come closer to the positions of Renaud Camus, who proclaims that the era of the Great Deculturation is followed by the era of the Great Replacement (of Europe’s white with the Arabic population).323 Rioufol’s essays revolve around the question of how to make the French people sovereign. Evidently neglected by the political elites, despised by the progressive media, in Rioufol’s opinion, le peuple français retains unity and vitality, and it should take to the streets at the right moment to reach for power. “The people” is substantialized here: it is a clearly defined entity prior to any conceptual game. The combination of this materialization with national particularism builds a demanding-​ressentiment narrative, whose dangers we know from history. A right-​wing publicist sets in motion the rhetorical procedure that Alain Badiou warns against in ”Twenty-​Four Notes on the Uses of the Word “People.” Adjectivized (nationalized) people is a construction marked by internal contradiction, an inert category useful only during military confrontation; for example, “Algerian people” in decolonization times or “Egyptian people” during demonstrations on Tahrir Square are formulas for freeing oneself from established state power.324 In other words, in this modal frame, all emancipation presupposes 322 I.  Rioufol, À la recherche du peuple perdu, Paris: Les éditions de Passy 2011. 323 R.  Camus, La Grande Déculturation, Paris: Fayard 2008; R. Camus, Le Grand Remplacement, Paris: Reinharc 2011. 324 A. Badiou, “Twenty-​Four Notes on the Uses of the Word “People” in: A. Badiou, P. Bourdieu, J. Butler, G. Didi-​Huberman, S. Khiari, J. Rancière, What Is A People?, trans. J. Gladding, New York: Columbia University Press 2013, p. 26.

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forceful confrontation. In another book, about the need for being reactionary (De l’urgence d’être réactionnaire, 2012), Rioufol writes that the French people have had “enough of being abused, ridiculed, fooled by democrats who do not like the people, humanists who do not like the people.”325 Such an approach does not build a political stage on which we could define the conflict and take on the roles of antagonists. Instead, it marks out a battlefield into which the opposing camps are to enter and mobilize supporters to close ranks in the name of fighting for the rights of the “true people,” while as Rancière warns, “there’s no such thing as the true people, there are only ever competing constructs of a people” (PA 88). However, we may observe the same processes at the other end of the political spectrum. They are much more interesting to Rancière who does not engage in arguments with nationalism or neo-​reactionism but attempts to clarify his position through polemical reference to Marxism and various strands of neo-​ Marxism. Rancière’s attitude to Marx’s legacy seems marked by ambivalence. The work of concepts he proposes happens on the borders of Marx’s wordplay, on the edges –​as Foucault would say –​of the broad field of discourse326 established by Marx. Certain terms are an essential part of his thinking, but they appear in an altered form, redefined or significantly rephrased. There is a regularity in this selective drawing from Marx’s vocabulary. I will report in a moment on the semantic shifts in the adopted part of Marx’s vocabulary, but first, let me write about the telling omissions. So, which notions of classical Marxism does Rancière completely omit? First, we may notice a lack of lexis that supports the critique of ideology and alienation theory. Rancière did deal with these issues in his youth; when participating in Althusser’s Reading “Capital” project, he examined the epistemological break in Marx’s work (meaning, the scientific revolution that occurred in his thought after 1845) in relation to the theme of commodity fetishism. Years later, in  Althusser’s Lesson, Rancière reduces this research to two fundamental theses: (1) Ideology exists in every society as a system of necessary fictions, provides it with cohesion, and regulates the functions of individuals; (2) The opposite of ideology is science, a source of knowledge capable of reversing the principle of domination (AL 144). In the same work, Rancière concludes that the ideology–​science opposition merely replicates the old dichotomies of

325 I.  Rioufol, De l’urgence d’être réactionnaire, Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France 2012, p. 118. Fr. “Assez de se faire malmener, ridiculiser, enfumer par des démocrates qui n’aiment pas le peuple, des humanistes qui n’aiment pas les gens.” 326 M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in: Modernity and Its Disconents, p. 306.

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metaphysics (AL 151–​152), and any critique of ideology inevitably gets caught up in the logic of demystification that sustains the division between two kinds of minds. Rancière reconstructs this logic in detail a little later in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres on the examples of Sartre’s philosophy and Bourdieu’s sociology. Second, we may easily note the absence of those concepts that establish dialectical schemes of causality, economic determination, and historical necessity. Rancière rejects all economic and historical determinism. In doing so, he proceeds in the spirit of Western Marxism, which as commonly argued, grew out of opposition to the mechanistic, evolutionist, and deterministic interpretation known as Marxism–​Leninism. This vulgarized method separates facts from their representations and favors a search for the determining factor “in the last instance.” Moreover, scholars sometimes accuse Rancière of being too general in this matter, overlooking the tensions generated by the capital circulation, ignoring the differences between two types of conflict related to the unequal distribution of the power to govern and the unequal partition of wealth respectively.327 Moreover, some argue that Rancière does not explain the relationship between emancipatory politics and socioeconomic reorganization.328 Rancière responds indirectly to these objections by reiterating that economics is the proper name for the deep cause, the ultimate instance, and the “primacy of economics, in a sense, also means the eternal reign of domination”329 (MOE 179). Until we vanquish easy economism, we will see people in socioeconomic terms rather than as an imagined social body. A rigorously Marxist perspective, which tells us to see the manifestations of the domination of capital in everything, “does not construct any space of agreement between perception, thought, affect, and action”330 (EQT 37). It is well known that historical determinism in Marx’s work has been disputed. We can see its traces in most of Marx’s writings, but at the same time, he emphasizes that between historical analysis and a vague vision of the future, between objective laws and human freedom, there is the domain of choices, social activity, and political action. Long before Lenin, the question “what will 327 Schreiber, L’Avenir de l’égalité, pp.  15–​17. 328 A.  Artous, Démocratie, citoyenneté, emancipation. Marx, Lefort, Balibar, Rancière, Rosanvallon, Negri, Paris: Syllepse 2010, pp. 67–​68. 329 J. Rancière, La méthode de l’égalité. Entretien avec Laurent Jeanpierre et Dork Zabunyan, Montrouge: Bayard Éditions 2012, p. 310: “Le primat de l’économie est aussi l’éternité de la domination.” 330 Fr. “ne construit plus aucun espace de concordance entre perception, pensée, affect et action.”

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history reveal?” was accompanied by the question “what do we do?”331 In turn, the ability to act and change the world depends not only on the fundamental processes associated with the state of productive forces but also on ideological and cultural superstructure. Terry Eagleton neatly captures it in the following words: “for Marx, what we say or think is ultimately determined by what we do [… while] what we do as historical beings is of course itself deeply bound up with thought and language.”332 Rancière chooses not to engage in interpretative nuances and reaches instead for creative recycling. He treats Marxism as a discursive material to be used in his own creation. In justifying his position en passant, Rancière emphasizes the historicity of Marx’s hermeneutics. Like Freud’s psychoanalysis, it is a child of the aesthetic age. The basic principle of this theoretical machine derives in a straight line from the literary revolution that turns abandons the logic of actions subject to rational objectives toward meanings hidden in apparent triviality and gives them a suprasensory and phantasmagorical character to see in them the coded writing of a social device (PdL 31). For the possibility of this critique to occur, we must recognize trivial reality as a “tissue of hieroglyphs.” In this sense, “the Marxian commodity steps out of the Balzacian shop” (DOP 127). However, Marxist cultural critique forgets its genesis: Kulturkritik wants to cast on the productions of Romantic poetics the gaze of dis-​ enchanted reason. But that disenchantment itself is part of the Romantic re-​enchantment that has widened ad infinitum the sensorium of art as the field of disused objects encrypting a culture, extending to infinity, too, the realm of fantasies to be deciphered and formatting the procedures of that decryption (DOP 127–​128).

In this perspective, Marxism turns out to be one of the many techniques of suspicion developed in the aesthetic regime. In turn, this should encourage unorthodox attitudes, especially since, in this matter, dogmatic approach leads to inevitable failure. The defeat of Marxism, which Rancière diagnosed in the 1970s, occurred on many levels: in philosophy, we may mention the focus on the questions of the state, the scientistic model of the knowledge–​power relations, the idea of a disinherited people with its reciprocal connection to the emancipatory mission of philosophy.333 Let us add to this list the compromised parties legitimizing their doctrine with Marxism (Marxism–​Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism)

331 E.  Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, New Haven: Yale University Press 2011, pp. 119–​120. 332 T.  Eagleton, Marx and Freedom, London: Phoenix 1998, p. 11. 333 Ruby, L’Interruption, p. 8.

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and Rancière’s own aversion to the organized communist movement. What remains is –​I return to my earlier statement –​“creative recycling,” in which the rejected is replaced with elements of its own making, and the adopted is blended into the new whole, displaced and refreshed. Let us now consider several such displacements. Communism. Modern philosophers gather many apologists of communism, albeit they uphold the “communist hypothesis” rather than any specific doctrine. For example, Alain Badiou believes that democracy is just another name for consensus and considers all disputes about true or false and just or unjust democracy outdated. Badiou argues that we should prepare to enter the third stage of communism, bearing in mind the ideological ferment of the first stage (from the time of Marx to the belle époque) and learning from the tragic mistakes of the second phase (from the October Revolution to the end of the twentieth century), marked by fetishized parties and absolutized ideas.334 Rancière remains a great advocate of democracy, so he is much more cautious in this case. During a speech at a London conference “On the Idea of Communism,” Rancière says that the communist hypothesis was formulated based on the emancipation hypothesis.335 It is the collectivization of anyone’s power (n’importe qui). Unfortunately, from the very beginning, the communist movement has been committed to a non-​egalitarian logic in its various forms (pedagogical-​ progressive or suspicious) and soon renewed the old Platonic division into two kinds of humanity. This opened the way for various institutional degenerations, and in the field of ideas, it created a characteristic double bind: communist’s enthusiasm was disqualified in the name of the workers’ experience and the other way around (MP 224). Today, if communism is still conceivable, it is possible only as a tradition created by a series of moments, in which the communist moment means “a new configuration of what common means. It is a reconfiguration of the universe of possibilities” (MP 226).336 We find ourselves at a point in which we have enough wisdom to reject Lyotardian blackmail:  there is no necessary connection between the idea of emancipation and the metanarrative of practical reason. It is better to perceive emancipation as timelessness that is

3 34 A. Badiou, F. Tardy, Philosophy and the Event, Cambridge: Polity 2013, pp. 16–​23. 335 J. Rancière, “Communistes sans communisme,” in: L’Idée du communisme. Conférence de Londres, eds. A. Badiou, S. Žizek, trans. Ch. Vivier, N. Segol, Fécamp: Lignes 2010, pp.  239–​240. 336 Translation from the ebook version of J. Rancière, Moments Politiques: Interventions 1977–​2009, trans. M. Foster, New York: Seven Stories Press 2014, n.p.

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neither a product nor a reversal of historical necessity but something heterogeneous to the dominant forms of experience. But why galvanize a corpse and talk about communism, when you can be satisfied with the concept of democracy? To such worded question, Jean-​Luc Nancy answers that democracy makes sense only as a possibility to be together. For democracy to remain itself, “it must also, in some way, be communist,”337 to renew relentlessly this communal moment. Rancière  –​who refers to “communism” only in purely descriptive fragments  –​speaks in a similar manner. He would have retained the term, because it emphasizes the principle of the unity and equality of intelligence, underlines its affirmative aspect, and indicates that it is a process of continuous self-​transformation: “I think that if there’s a communist idea that makes sense as an idea, it’s the idea of a world based on these practices of emancipation, that is, the idea that there is an intelligence shared by everyone, no matter who they are, which one must try to put into action” (PA 60). At the same time, Rancière would reject the term without hesitation if it meant that emancipation can only be achieved through global transformation and that we know how to achieve this goal (MP 232). The communist experience is lost each time it becomes institutionalized. This is where its ephemerality and strength reside, because it can exist regardless of the historical moment, meaning there is no need to wait for the end of capitalism. Class Struggle. This is another term that sporadically appears in Rancière’s writings and another one that significantly differs from its Marxian understanding. For Rancière, class struggle is no longer a structural conflict between social strata produced by the objective opposition of their positions in the production process. It is no longer a conflict between owners of the means of production and those deprived of them, which changes according to the historical stages of production development –​turning into clashes at the level of economics, politics, and ideology –​and finally having its own teleology, namely leading inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat and then the establishment of a classless society. In La Mésentente, we read that class struggle is not the secret drive of politics or the hidden truth behind appearances. It is politics itself (D 18). In other words, politics does not exist because narrow social groups enter conflicts due to different interests. It is politics itself that differentiates human collectivities, establishing the difference between the group and itself and between the group and other groups.

337 J.-​L.  Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. P. A. Brault, M. Naas, Fordham University Press 2010, p. 15.

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Looking back at the revolutionary pamphlets of Marx’s time, we clearly see that the declaration of class struggle appeared in two forms: proclamation that there are no classes but only universal humanity; descriptions of conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that can be understood as an attempt to “institute a single locus of polemical division” (OS 33) to express disagreement over the unequal distribution of wealth and rights. In both cases, the class is not an established or finished element, and it disallows description in purely economic terms. Instaed, it is a rhetorical device that disrupts the calculus of part of the society and establishes a new political subject: “The idea of class struggle doesn’t state that first of all there are classes, and then they enter the struggle; it states that there’s a power system and there are forces which fight against this power system” (PA 93). The idea of class conflict constructs the political scene and brings onto it the “party of the poor,” the disinherited, those who have no power to rule. It does not bring a description of the actual state, namely the war between parts of the community but stages the struggle between two forms of that community: police and politics. The former seeks to stitch together the relationships between bodies, meanings, functions, places, and institutions, while the latter “opens up the intervals” by separating names and manifestations from bodies and properties.338 “In the political sense, a class is something else entirely: an operator of conflict, a name for counting the uncounted, a mode of empowerment superimposed on the reality of all social groups” (D 83). Thus, we may agree with David Panagia, who writes that “Marx is the critical dispositif who renders a supernumerary unaccountability political. Marx’s project is thus understood by Rancière as a project of acknowledging the supernumerary.”339 Proletariat. According to Marx, proletariat was supposed to abolish class struggle. It is not a class but the abolition of all classes. It is a community of the dispossessed and deprived of rights, property, and illusions. As we remember, workers “have no homeland” or any particular interest to defend. As a community, they constitute a “negative universality,” which will change into a positive universality through revolutionary transformations.340 The negativity

338 Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, p. 40. 339 Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments, p. 69. 340 “Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-​ activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-​activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities.” K. Marks, F. Engels, A Critique of

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resides already in the term itself, whose etymology leads to the Latin proletarius, meaning “a citizen excluded from taxation and military duty who serves the state only as a reproducer,” formed from proles, “offspring, litter,” or pro-​alere, “to feed.” In other words, proletariate means those who only procreate, who remain immersed in the anonymous processes of life support and reproduction. From the viewpoint of other classes –​or those who uphold the police form of the community –​this is the definition of anyone, of beings excluded from the social order. I say “beings,” because a proletarian occupies a position on the edge of humanity, in the sense that he is always exposed to dehumanization; as in Orwell’s dystopian vision from 1984, in which he explicitly states: “proles are not human beings.”341 However, let us note how this archaic lexeme from the legal vocabulary of ancient Rome returned in the nineteenth century to become a strictly political slogan. Rancière calls this return “an anachronistic collage:” The combination of the ancient legal term and the modern figure of the worker had to function as a complete redistribution of divisions into what is common and what is not. A proletarian is a worker who separates himself from his status as a domestic employee in order to affirm his capacity to share what is common, declaring that a private workplace is a public place and that a public place is everybody’s affair. As the one he addresses does not see the common objects of which the proletarian speaks, and does not hear him as the one who preaches what is common, the community open in this way is a dissensical community.342

To set in motion the unconventional distribution of the sensible and to establish a new political subject, Rancière must reach for a name that contains an error. Equating workers with the Roman plebeians is an innovative metaphor that does not describe reality but disrupts the petrified narratives about

the German Ideology, Buffalo: Prometheus Books 1988, p. 50. See also E. Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Ch. Turner, London and New York: Verso 2007, p. 39–​40. 341 G.  Orwell, 1984, in: Orwell, Animal Farm and 1984, Boston: Harcourt 2003, p. 126. 342 J. Rancière, F. Noudelmann, “La communauté comme dissentiment,” Rie Descartes 42/​ 2003, p. 87. Fr. “Il a fallu que la mise en commun du terme juridique antique et de la figure de l’ouvrier moderne fonctionne comme redistribution domplète de partages entre le commun et le non commun. Un prolétaire, c’est un ouvreir qui sépare de son statut d’employé domestique pour affirmer sa capacité au commun en affirmant que le lieu privé du travail est un lieu public et que le lieu public est l’affaire de tous. Comme celui auquel il s’adresse ne voit pas les objets communs dont le premier lui parle et ne l’entend pas comme énonciateur du commun, la communauté ainsi ouverte est une communauté dissensuelle.”

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that reality, thus disrupting the social syntagma and introducing a necessary gap in the existing relations between names and social actors. “Proletarian” is the product of linguistic invention and poetic inventiveness, but it also is an operative name unifying various activities, such as “queer” at the turn of the twentieth century.343 The problem is that a metaphor wears out over time and loses its mobility. As Nietzsche writes, it transforms into “coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer coins.”344 The power of the metaphor that links various phenomena in a single name ceases to work over time, it loses itself in the mirage of pure description. Marx himself struggles with this problem: On the one hand, it will designate the dissolution of classes actually taking place –​which is to say also the dissolution of the working class by itself... But at the same time it will fix the class which effects the declassification in its own substantivity, thereby resuscitating the fantasy of a good distribution of social functions or, in other words, in the final analysis, introducing a new form of the fantasy of the well-​ordered One (OS 33–​34).

Already the creation of a party uniting the proletarians was an attempt to give form to this contradiction; the figure of an international organization representing all the disinherited is a dangerous example of “one that subjugates,” which replaces the multiplicity of divisions with “the powers of imaginary incorporation, of feudal stratification” (OS 34). The striving for communist unity destroyed the polemical space of division and brought consensus, it reduced the multiplicity we call the people. The People. In “Twenty-​Four Notes on the Uses of the Word “People,” Badiou contrasts two negative and two positive meanings of the term. We have the concept of “the people” reduced to a racial or national type, and in the more discrete yet even more harmful version, subordinated to the legitimate and beneficial 343 The interference of Rancière’s and Butler’s vocabularies leads to a redefinition of the speechless “queer,” whereby the queer subject appears as a “new proletarian.” See C. W. Ruitenberg, “Queer Politics in Schools: A Rancièrean reading,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42.5–​6/​2010, pp. 625–​628; C. Pelletier, “Emancipation, Equality and Education: Rancière’s Critique of Bourdieu and the Question of Performativity,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 30.2/​2009, pp. 137–​150; A. De Boever, “Feminism After Rancière: Women in J. M. Coetzee and Jeff Wall,” Transformations. Journal of Media and Culture 19/​2011. 344 F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” trans. D. Breazeale in: The Nietzsche Reader, ed. K. Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, Somerset: Wiley-​Blackwell 2006, p. 117.

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State that ensures the stability and growth of the middle class that consumes the products of Capital and freely expresses its views, provided it does not interfere with the mechanism of State. In the positive understanding, “the people” is established in a historical perspective, meaning an entity whose existence is denied by colonial domination or by the invader, it functions in futur antérieur, which expresses an action that will happen before another action expressed in the future tense. In the last meaning, “the people” are all those whom the State excludes from “its” legitimate people; “the people” assert its existence in the will to abolish the State.345 Rancière’s reflection on the concept of the people is far from miserabilism and revolutionary pathos. Le peuple is the mass of those who have no title to rule –​neither wealth nor noble origins –​but who simultaneously recognize their own freedom. The moment of its recognition and the confirmation of one’s own possibilities seems to be crucial. In Aristotle’s division of classes, each class is the depositary of a specific “title:” aristoi possess virtue, oligoi possess wealth, and demos possess a paradoxical kind of freedom that is summarized in the Homeric heroes’ maxim: “stay silent and submit” (DOP 30). In fact, to recognize and confirm the freedom of the people (according to the third thesis of politics) means to negate the logic of arche, to break with the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, and with the logic of attribution that gives the right to occupy a given position: “The ‘liberty’ of the people, which constitutes the axiom of democracy, has as its real content a break with the axiom of domination, that is, any sort of correlation between a capacity for ruling and a capacity for being ruled” (DOP 32). Jean-​Luc Nancy notes that the word “democracy” is included in a sequence of names referring to kratos, meaning “force” (plutocracy, aristocracy, theocracy, technocracy, autocracy, bureaucracy), rather than to a sequence based on arche, “the first principle” (monarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy) or its absence (anarchy). Hence, the law to which the institution of democracy refers cannot follow a different principle than the absence of any human nature.346 The power democracy employs must remain in a living (negotiative or confrontational) relationship with the freedom of the people. Rancière does the same –​though perhaps more radically  –​for he argues that we do not live in democracies but in states of

3 45 Badiou, “Twenty-​Four Notes on the Uses of the Word “People,” pp. 30–​31. 346 J.-​L. Nancy, “Finite and Infinite Democracy,” in: G. Agamben, A. Badiou, D. Bensaïd, W. Brown, J.-​L. Nancy, J. Rancière, K. Ross, S. Žižek, Democracy in What State?, trans. W. McCuaig, New York: Columbia 2011, pp. 65–​66.

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oligarchic law and that democracy, in which the popular recognition of freedom finds expression, constantly dismantles the ossified system of power. At this point, we encounter an antagonism founded on the opposition of the people as ethnos and as demos: various manifestations of the people continually break up the community of origin, religion,347 language, and culture. The people do not constitute any entity but (according to the fifth thesis on politics) “the supplementary part in relation to every count of the parts of the population” or “the supplement that disjoins the population from itself, by suspending all logics of legitimate domination” (POA 33). This sense was already present in the reform of Cleisthenes, who transformed the conglomerate of tribes into the territory of the polis. However, demos as the abstract surplus or error in calculus lasts on the verge of disappearing, and whenever it disappears, ethnos assumes its position. Finally, and most importantly, demos exists in various and contradictory  forms: There have been strong figures of subjectivization, such as the revolutionary peoples and the proletariat. However, these figures, inhabited by a homonymy, were always crossed by contradiction themselves. There were always multiple peoples in a people and multiple proletariats in a proletariat. Identification and disidentification did not stop mixing their reasons and their figures of subjectivization, threatened by lapsing back into identity substantialization.348

In other words, the people is a form of flawed symbolization, an element of a linguistic game, prone to misunderstanding and always in danger of petrification. The people constitutes an irreducible multiplicity according to the formula:  “the people” does not exist. What exist are diverse or even antagonistic figures of the people.”349 347 At this point, we must agree with the critical voices that point to the absence of any problematization of religion in Rancière’s philosophy: does the unifying, consensual power of monotheistic religions, linked to the power to divide and reinforce existing structures (for example, patriarchal ones) work in a similar way to the community of language and culture? See G. Fraisse, La sexuation du monde. Réflexions sur l’émancipation, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po 2016, pp. 49–​67. 348 Rancière, Noudelmann, “La communauté comme dissentiment,” p. 90. Fr. “Il y a eu des figures de subjectivation fortes comme le peuple révolutionnaire ou le prolétariat. Mais ces figures, habitées par l’homonumie, ont elles-​mêmes toujours été traversées par la contradiction. Il y a toujours eu plusieurs peiples dans le peuple et plusieurs prolétariats dans le prolétariat. Identification et désidentification n’ont cessé d’entremêler leurs raisons et les figures de subjectivation d’être menacées de retomber dans la substantialisation identitaire.” 349 J. Rancière, “The Populism That Is Not to Be Found,” in: A. Badiou et al., What Is a People?, p. 102.

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However, something else seems to be important here. “The people” as a political subject can only exist in political action. Let us recall here the first two theses about politics: “It is the political relationship that makes it possible to conceive of the subject of politics, not the other way round” (DOP 27); “What is specific to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contraries” (DOP 29). Therefore, “the people” is not a large collective body that expresses through the representation of itself; it is a “the quasi-​body that is produced by the operation of this system”350 (EQT 13). It is a non-​substantial and ephemeral entity, non-​existent beforehand in terms of its own manifestations, always at risk of falling into identity positivity. It is a contingent name for processes of subjectification mixed with processes of disidentification that bring into dispute forms of visibility and models of identity. We call this dispute politics. Political Action. The status of political action in Marx’s writings is also a matter of dispute. Some argue that Marx did not think through the relationship between the social and the political, and as a result, politics as a field detached from the underlying economy, became the domain of lawlessness. Others even argue that in Marx’s view the social contains the political factor. Some even claim both, oscillating between contradictory diagnoses. As we know, Rancière describes politics as a movement that interrupts the order of domination, which can exist only because the social division is not inclusive and always contains an error. The existence of politics is momentary: it occurs (il y a de la politique) and records its effects in the institutional sphere (D 16–​17). However, politics exists only in the domain of appearance; there, politics finds its object called “the people,” whose characteristic feature is that it differs from itself. “The people” achieves its intended effects not by deconstructing this gap but by extending sheer simulation (M 125–​126). It creates fiction without being an illusion. While the latter defines itself in opposition to reality, the former refers to its own effects. Eventually, every power operates due to a fiction of the people. However, this fiction is open to changes, additions, and paraphrases. Thus, political action overwrites the social order without being determined by it. At the same time, political action has no arbitrary character, as it is subject to the “communism of the intelligence,” the assumed original equality of all. Uncoordinated emancipatory actions sometimes turn out to be organized (by a communal emancipatory intelligence, which is a collectivization of abilities invested in dissensual scenes), while the organization of the political movement

350 Fr. “le quasi-​corps qui est produit par le fonctionnement de ce système.”

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often boils down to the spontaneous reproduction of existing forms of social discipline (ES 49; MP 220). Culture, the primary form of disidentification that makes it possible to say something different from one’s kinsmen, social group, or interest group, plays a crucial role in this arrangement. It is the kind of public space in which the word breaks away from its anchoring, which is where it allies itself with the politics that begins where it you can be anyone. The people reveal themselves in the game of stolen words and images, in the contradiction of a proper name that defines no property, in the artistic action and political action that brings them into existence. At this point, let us consider the dynamics of becoming-​a-​subject.

Non Sumus, Non Existumus The idea of the people as a multiplicity-​becoming-​one constantly returns in various forms. One of its latest incarnations is “multitude” developed by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt. In their four books, Negri and Hardt present a comprehensive vision of contemporary global capitalism, examining it for subversive elements or those that could be used to build a different system. They propose an analysis of the conditions of possibility for specific actions and sketch their strategy by following the motto: “We want not only to define an event but also to grasp the spark that will set the prairie ablaze.”351 Labor of Dionysus352 contains an initial study focused on the moment when the Western world entered postmodernity (around 1968), with its inherent post-​ Fordist organization of work and transnational circulation of capital. Empire extensively analyzes the current world order based on the subsumption of work in capital, meaning the modeling of all areas of life in the likeness of capital. Negri and Hardt develop here the following thesis and accompanying hypothesis that will be important for my below deliberation: great financial forces produce both commodities and subjectivities (needs, social relations, bodies, and minds), namely they “produce producers.” Thus, Empire resembles a two-​ headed eagle: one of its heads is the legal structure and machinery of biopolitical domination while the other entails a multitude of productive subjectivities endlessly reconfiguring the system itself. At this point, the authors introduce the emancipatory hypothesis that we can join the globalization processes deconstructing

3 51 M. Hardt, A. Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge: The Belknap Press 2009, p. xiv. 352 M. Hardt, A. Negri, Labor of Dionysus, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 1994.

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national states borders in order to weaken the logic of capitalism: we can use the anti-​fundamentalist and anti-​essentialist ideology of the world market against itself. The capitalism of postmodernity intensifies means of control while encouraging the proliferation of resistance strategies:  “the passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation” –​the creative forces capable of constructing a Counter-​Empire. Already in their second book, Negri and Hardt describe the birth of a new community, one deeper and more radical than any other community in the history of capitalism. It is multitude, which engages in the circulation of goods and the generation of subjects, and “through circulation the multitude reappropriates space and constitutes itself as an active subject.” The multitude produces the community, called the people, which is its embodiment and product, but also its liberation.353 Negri and Hardt develop the problem of multiplicity as an economic, social, and, at the point of arrival, political subject in the next two works, Multitude and Commonwealth. Multitude is a multiplicity forming beyond the reach of hegemonic power composed of “singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common,” namely the property that escapes the public/​private dichotomy.354 It is the collective intelligence that tears the Empire apart from the inside. Critics of this concept draw attention primarily to two weaknesses. The first is strong historical determinism, namely the belief that the logic of Empire produces an involuntary Counter-​Empire that will inevitably lead to the rule of the multitude, which is “announced as the messianic” rather than theoretically established.355 It is hard to disagree with this accusation considering the significant combination of Marxian determinism with prophetic rhetoric: Capital creates its own gravediggers: pursuing its own interests and trying to preserve its own survival, it must foster the increasing power and autonomy of the productive multitude. And when that accumulation of powers crosses a certain threshold, the multitude will emerge with the ability autonomously to rule common wealth.356

The second accusation concerns a blithe reduction of political antagonism, or what Mouffe calls the post-​political357 and Rancière –​the metapolitical abolition

353 M. Hardt, A. Negri, Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2000, p. 397. 354 Hardt,  Negri, Commonwealth, p. xiii. 355 A. Moreiras, “A Line of Shadow: Metaphysics in Counter-​Empire,” Rethinking Marxism 3–​4/​2001, p.  222. 356 Hardt, Negri, Commonwealth, p. 311. 357 Mouffe, On the Political, pp.  130–​133.

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of dispute in the name of puissance identified with the unconscious will of Being (ETP 297). According to Rancière, the idea of revolted multiplicity as a subject entering the stage of history is a romantic pantheism filtered through Deleuzian vitalism. Here, pantheism means the belief in a hidden power that infiltrates social substance and manifests itself in action. The transformation of the world becomes possible despite the non-​existence of some transcendent rational subject, the elite of professional revolutionaries aware of historical necessity. The Deleuzian filter allows us to maintain the distinction between power as controlling and disciplining (pouvoir) and power as the capacity to act (puissance). The people as a collective subject either set puissance in motion and act outside of institutions or play the game on terms established by pouvoir. In both cases, the change remains a function of deterritorialization, the potential inherently combined with the desire-​production that creates the social.358 There occurs a transformation of the Marxist scheme into a vitalist one. This metamorphosis entails something elementally Romantic, namely the belief that a frozen mass can be contrasted with a circulating energy, whose depositary remains the multitude. For Rancière, these are still attempts to revive the idea by which it will be possible to finally abolish politics in the name of a new religion, establish a community of people united by faith, and annihilate dispute and disagreement. Meanwhile, politics is the domain of aesthetics; as a form of reprocessing intersubjective relations, it requires a stage and usually takes the form of theater. What appears dangerous is the dream of disassembling the stage, on which false names resound and impossible identifications stage themselves.359 The theater metaphor plays such an important role in Rancière’s philosophy that some commentators even speak of a specific “theatrocracy” with an anti-​Platonic edge. Peter Hallward argues that –​ according to Rancière –​politics has seven theatrical qualities: it is spectacular (staged), artificial (based on masquerade), manifold (non-​monological), subversive (resists police power), contingent (creates own space as a bricolage in the police territory), liminal (enables simultaneously being oneself and not oneself), and it encourages 358 J.  Bednarek, Polityka poza formą. Ontologiczne uwarunkowania poststrukturalistycznej filozofii polityki, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie 2012, pp. 303–​304. 359 This idea is exaggeratedly attributed to Deleuze, as if ignoring the difference between Anti-​Oedipus and Mille plateaux. Anti-​Oedipus presents a conviction that only further deterritorialization –​leading to delirium and schizophrenia –​is an authentic revolutionary process, while the later Mille plateux calls for moderation, since deterritorializing processes must be balanced by institutional reterritorialization. Bednarek, Polityka poza formą, pp.  320–​322.

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improvisation.360 As Olivier Davis writes in a similar vein, engagement in politics presupposes its introduction into the realm of perception; subjectification is similar to acting, namely pretending to be someone we are not; it also presupposes the definition of a shared stage.361 However, we should add that the theatrical topic does not fully organize Rancière’s philosophy, it does not even constitute its rhetorical matrix as in Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionism. If theater is occasionally mentioned, it is because of its polemical potential and functioning as a “manifestation,” in which the process of becoming itself is guided by a common sensible event, which according to Didi-​Huberman is the moment when the affective develops along with the effective.362 Rancière argues that the essence of the stage is not the backstage or some secret machinery but the fact that it is a place of improvisation and encounter (MDS 29–​30). To avoid a mise en scène, Negri and Hardt seek to dismantle makeshift theatrical instances to bring real political subject on the stage of reality. They force an affirmative interpretation of the issues of biopolitics, doubling the concept and locating hope in “biopolitics” as the productive power of labor, capable of resisting “biopower,” meaning systemic control and normalization. Negri writes that there is biopower in the Foucauldian understanding, and there is resistance to it, “the resistance of life to power, from within it—​inside this power, which has besieged life.”363 The molar–​molecular opposition also serves Negri and Hardt as an old trick: the depreciation of the people as a molar concept is combined with the recognition of a new, vital people, meaning the molecular energy of the multitude.364 In all these endeavors, there surfaces a need to find a strong political subject and inscribe it within the horizon of messianic expectation or in the scheme of salvation. The former draws from Marx’s thesis of the explosion

360 P. Hallward, “Jacques Rancière et la théâtrocratie ou Les limites de l’égalité improvisée,” in: La Philosophie déplacée, pp.  486–​492. 361 Davis, Jacques Rancière, pp. 86–​87. These factual remarks have nothing to do with the critique of the alleged theatricalization of the entire human world; if only of the kind Antonia Birnbaum formulates in her philippic, which diagnoses the annihilation of politics: “the real load of politics is devoured its aesthetics.” Birnbaum, Egalité radicale, p. 223. 362 Didi-​Huberman adds a philosophical tradition to this practice; he points to revised by Bataille phenomenology of Merleau-​Ponty and Maussian anthropology. See G. Didi-​Huberman, “To Render Sensible” in: A. Badiou, et al., What Is a People? 363 A. Negri, A. Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, trans. M. B. Debevoise, London and New York: Routledge 2004, ebook version. 364 N. Poirier, “Entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Dissonance 1/​2004.

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of mature capitalism –​a thesis that history has never proven to be true –​while the latter from the motif of expecting kairos, the “moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time” and “has to be grasped by a political subject.”365 The people  is neither a subject nor a community, nor even a plurality, but the name of an act of subjectification; its existence is characterized by momentousness and multiplicity: in political action certain entities and groups metaphorically define themselves and establish symbolically mediated relations with others. Their activity’s efficacy is founded on non-​identity and verbal disjunction, not on identicality and alignment of names with ways of being. Either way, counting on a spontaneous emancipation of the masses seems unwarranted, which entails the side effect of annulling politics. Ernesto Laclau writes about it in a similar way: “Because it is only natural, according to the authors, that the oppressed revolt, their unity is simply the expression of a spontaneous tendency to converge. … Since vertically separated struggles do not need to be horizontally linked, every political construction disappears.”366 Rancière’s correction is that he retains the spontaneous tendency toward political subjectivities but denies their spontaneous convergence and synchronicity. He stands for a democratic pluriverse. As Rancière writes in his commentary on Empire, to understand what democracy means is to abandon the hopes of Negri and Hardt, because “egalitarian society is only ever set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts” (HD 96–​97). Let us now put this polemic aside and try to specify how the subjectification process occurs and what happens when it ends successfully, when les sans-​part are recognized in their new identity and enter the community. Let us recall that the stake is the establishment of such a subject of action, which has no substrate or coherent identity. It is about “the formation of some one [un] that is no self [soi] but the relation of a self to another one”.367 Formally, Descartes’s formula “ego sum, ego existo”368 remains the prototype of subjectification. In the process 365 Hardt, Negri, Commonwealth, p. 165. 366 E.  Laclau, On Populist Reason, London and New York: Verso 2005, p. 240. 367 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 87. Fr. “la formation d’un un qui n’est pas un soi mais la relation d’un soi à un autre.” 368 Rancière refers to Descartes’s “second formula,” which remains in the shadow of the earlier ego cogito, ergo sum. At the same time, Rancière ignores the difference between the two, which may have important philosophical implications. See E. Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. S. Miller, New York: Fordham University Press 2016, pp. 55–​72.

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I analyze, subjectification happens in a many times inverted form: “non sumus, non existumus” (M 59–​60). What is the difference? First, the assertion turns into negation. Second, the “I” changes into “we.” Finally, the constatation changes into a paradoxical statement, in which the subject asserts its own non-​existence. Illustrating the complexity of the process of becoming a political subject –​all these reversals call for commentary. Negation. Politics is not made by social groups or their representatives but subjects of utterance and manifestation, always surplus to the calculus of social groups. Before a new subject manifests, it does not exist in any form. The precondition is the rejection of existing subject names, namely disidentification. Any attempt to act politically with the exclusion of these “intervals of subjectification” through seeking solid roots of (ethnic, national, cultural, gender) difference is in danger of slipping into particularism. A truly political project is not the unification of a group of people under a particular motto but a “declassification from the identities of the police order.”369 Plural. Inscribed in some “we” from the beginning, the “I” is created through a series of actions and statements previously unrecognized as possible in the field of experience and whose recognition results in the transformation of the field (M 59). The vector of these actions is turned toward others, in the sense that no “I” ever establishes itself in an interactional void; even when it comes to purely symbolic or imagined interactions. The plural form also points to the necessary connection between these processes and the community’s transformations. Subjectification builds the community by ruining it, by making common what was not common, by referring to those who previously were only private individuals as community actors. Subjectification ruins its previous form, because the one who was the manifestation’s addressee had not yet seen the common objects and heard the voice of the other, according to the logic of mésentente. Openness to new distribution of the sensible destroys previous configuration of data. Logical Structure. The “we” speaking of its own non-​existence seemingly becomes entangled in a performative contradiction; this sentence means one thing and does another, for when it is expressed by a subject, it attests to its existence. However, we are operating in a space in which something like “performative contradiction” does not have a raison d’être: in Rancière’s reflection, the subject derives

369 T.  May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière: Equality in Action, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2010, p. 12.

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from linguistic performatives. “Non sumus, non existumus” reflects a moment of subjectification: it is a sentence that both diagnoses a lack (of the given “we” in the current distribution of the sensible) and affirms the possibility of its expression or forming own judgments against accepted obviousness. Even if it claims it does not exist, with this utterance the non-​existent collective subject that speaks of itself as “we” marks its presence. In the next step, the collective subject will find a metaphorical term for itself that will bring it within the understanding gaze of others. The name of the subject must be the key element in this system because it destroys existing divisions and defines the sphere of new experience. The name acts as a spacer (espaceur), which can nevertheless soon become a new identifier (identifieur). “People,” “nation,” “proletariat,” or “citizen”  –​ these notions all introduce the space necessary for the political moment to happen. However, another condition for this process is the impossible identification with the other. Subject is a “crossing of identities based on a crossing of names.”370 It goes beyond the either-​or logic toward the paradoxical logic of both-​and, based on the principle of “we are them and we are not them.” The place in which the difference manifests itself lies not in group “essence” or culture but in the argument’s topos, which is expressed in the space: This can be: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” “Workers, farmers, we are/​The great party of the workers,” “Wir sind das Volk,” or “We are all German Jews.” A subjectivization is an improper predication: a part of the population is not “the people,” French Aryans are not German Jews, a bourgeois revolutionary is not a proletarian, etc.371

In other words, the subject always appears in the interval of two unacceptable identities, in the in-​betweenness, in the gap between names, identities, and existential statuses: between humanity and its absence, citizenship and its negation. Être-​ensemble is être-​entre, being between cultures and worlds.372 Thus, we arrive at the following sequence of gestures: disidentification allows for escaping police

370 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 88. Fr. “Un croisement d’identités reposant sur un croisement de noms.” 371 Rancière, Noudelmann, “La communauté comme dissentiment,” p. 86. Fr. “Ce peut être ‘les hommes naissent libres et égaux en droit’ ou ‘Ouvriers, pysans, nous sommes/​ le grand parti de travailleurs,’ ‘Wir sind das Volk’ ou ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands.’ Une subjectivation, c’est une prédication impropre: une partie de la population n’est pas ‘le peuple,’ des aryens francais ne sont pas des juifs allemands.” 372 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 90.

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logic (not being a worker reduced to a useful body, not being a French person subordinate to colonial power), adoption of a name (“proletarian,” “republican,” “revolutionist,” “woman,” “gay”) refers to abstraction while locating itself in the place of conflict, finally –​impossible identification with the other. It is only here that the logic of the political construction of subjectivity bears fruit; we may call this logic “heterology,” or the logic of the other, according to the three terms of otherness. First, it is never the simple affirmation of an identity, it is always at the same time the denial of an identity imposed by another, fixed by police logic. The police want “exact” names that mark the assignment of people to their place and to their work. On the other hand, politics is concerned with “improper” names, with misnomers that articulate a flaw and manifest a prejudice. Second, it is a demonstration, and a demonstration always supposes the other to whom it is addressed. … Third, the logic of subjectivization always involves an impossible identification.373

Hence, as Bernard Aspe puts it, the subject is “not identical with itself and identical with another.”374 However, some indicate the multilateral risks associated with this concept: it would involve the instability, fragility, and ephemerality of such an entity and its alleged abstractness; I have confronted this type of accusations earlier above. As Joël Madore writes, Rancière indeed designs a model of transcendental subject with no content, and he is to unintentionally drift toward liberal positions like all contemporary leftist thought. After all, it turns out that political community is supposed to be a neutral space of formal equality in which “new entities” reveal themselves once the shackles fall. Meanwhile, experience teaches us that every self-​determining entity or group –​even if it emerges from the most extreme rupture –​carries the baggage of family, language, and cultural context.375 However, this critique misses its target. Rancière constructs

373 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 89. Fr. “Premièrement, elle n’est jamais la simple affirmation d’une identité, elle est toujours en même temps le déni d’une identité imposée par un autre, fixée par la logique policière. La police veut on effet des noms „exacts” qui marquent l’assignation des gens à leur place et à leur travail. La politique, elle, est affiare des noms „impropres”, de misnomers qui articulent une faille et manifestent un tort. Deuxièmement, elle est une démonstration et une démonstration suppose toujours un autre à qui elle s’adresse. … Troisièmement, la logique de la subjectivation comporte toujours une identification impossible.” 374 B.  Aspe, Partage de la nuit. Deux études sur Jacques Rancière, Caen:  Nous 2015, p. 24: “est autre que lui-​même et même qu’un autre.” 375 J. Madore, “Rancière entre l’émancipation et aliénation. Une interrogation critique à partir de Kant et Lévinas,” in: Démocratie et modernité, p. 279.

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a schematic model of political subjectification, but each time he emphasizes that there is a continuity in every rupture and “anachronistic collage.” These gestures are imbued with a unique cultural, linguistic, and moral content. Subjectification only removes groups and individuals from the sphere of the obvious, but disidentification and impossible identification do not mean the renunciation of the past and the symbolic “obiit, hic natus est.” Let us reach for some model examples. Rancière takes the first of them from ancient Roman history  –​not directly from Titus Livius but a reworked story by Pierre-​Simon Ballanche  –​the secessio plebis from 494 BC. This happened during the consolidation of power in the hands of patricians, who held the exclusive right for public functions and shaped legislation to maximize their profits from landed property. In the face of this domination, the Roman plebeians  –​ farmers, servants, and new settlers –​revolted and chose secessio as a form of rebellion: they refused to obey their employers and military superiors (in plebeian troops), withdrawing from the city to the Aventine Hill. The messenger of patricians, Agrippa Menenius heard that the plebeians intend to found their own city. As a response, Agrippa offered them a moralistic fable of the stomach and other members of the body, namely the nation as the body in which every organ must perform its function; albeit some say this speech was invented many centuries later. The magnates’ reaction suggests surprise: they did not use force, they made an agreement and implemented the secessionists’ demands; the tribune of the people function gained the right to interfere in the legal processes, the right to veto the senate’s resolutions, and so on. This is a perfect example of a successful political action based on logical revolt: the dominated emerged from a state of quasi-​animal inability and impotence through a specific division of space (leaving the city and retreating to the hill), time (refusing to work), and social roles (creating a community without leaders) by the establishment of a common stage on which the disputants can debate anything (D 23–​28). They also rejected the organic topicality, recognizing in Agrippa’s story an insidious naturalization of the state of subordination. They based their action not on the hierarchical vision of bodily members but on the deep logic of the conversational situation. After all, every spoken word becomes meaningful when there is a subject capable of understanding. Thus, the message of inequality becomes part of the assumed equality of intelligence: Behind that fable’s moral, which illustrated the inequality of functions in the social body, lay quite a different moral, one inherent in the very act of composing a fable. This act of composition was based on the assumption that it was necessary to speak and that this speaking would be heard; … The relationship of a representative of the upper class to

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the members of the lower class was subordinated to a different one, the relationship of narrator to listeners (PS 82).

This event reveals yet another aspect if we turn to historians’ reports. In The Social History of Rome, Géza Alföldy notes that a year before the first secession, a temple dedicated to the goddess Ceres whom only the plebeians worshipped was built on the Aventine. This foundation of a temple was nothing less than the union of the plebs into a sacral community. It is entirely understandable that a separate community formed within the populus Romanus should commit itself to the worship of a religious cult, for the plebs could only make its union legitimate by invoking divine protection. Yet, at the same time, this act was a conscious imitation of the foundation of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, at the religious heart of the patrician state (traditionally, in 507 BC), an imitation designed to express in another way the autonomy of the separate plebeian community. In fact, this community did not confine itself to the worship of a religious cult: it raised the cry that it was a “state within a state.”376

This means that the political moment of secession was the result of long-​term processes of self-​organization, which through specific ploys organized resistance without breaking the law. Under the pretext of religious practices, people organized plebeian assemblies (concilia plebis), preparing ground for the construction of a sovereign political structure. Both in the rebellious group and in the relationship plebeians–​patricians, they established an absolute primacy of egalitarian relations, following the motto “equality must be posited if inequality is to be explained” (OS 82). Therefore, we may understand secession not as a revolt of the poor against an oppressive order but as an “an affirmation of full humanity by those who were considered inferior beings, locked in the only choice between two forms of mutism: silent obedience or the brutal revolt of animal instincts.”377 Emancipation is not the result of struggle but its precondition. The model character of the Roman plebeians’ gesture also stems from the fact that it contains the ambiguity inherent in every emancipation: it means taking the position that helps fight the dominant order and simultaneously creates space in which one can escape its laws (EQT 50).

376 G.  Alföldy, The Social History of Rome, trans. D. Braund, F. Pollock, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1988, p. 15. 377 J. Rancière, “Préface,” in: P.-​S. Ballanche, Première Sécession de la plèbe, Rennes: Pontcerq 2017, p. 13. Fr. “Une affirmation de pleine humanité opérée par ceux qui étaient considérés comme des êtres inférieurs, enfermés dans le seul choix entre deux formes de mutisme: l’obéissance silencieuse ou la révolte brutale des instincts animaux.”

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To use an example from another era, we may similarly interpret the activity of revolutionary activist August Blanqui. Since 1824, Blanqui, a naturalized Italian, was active in Carbonari societies, fought in the July Revolution of 1830, and soon afterward founded the society Friends of the People (Amis du Peuple), then Society of Human Rights (Société des Droits de l’Homme), Society of Families (Société des Familles), and finally, after a short imprisonment, Society of Seasons (Société des Saisons). The activity of these groups –​and later ones, created after the February Revolution –​which organized demonstrations, assassination attempts, and revolutionary agitation repeatedly led to Blanqui’s imprisonment and emigration. Blanqui relied on materialist-​atheistic assumptions and fought for the universality of civil rights: universal suffrage, women’s rights, children’s rights.378 During his trial in 1832, when asked by the judge about his profession, he replied: “I am a proletarian.” To the objection that such a profession does not exist, he supposedly replied that indeed it does and is practiced by thirty million French people. Eventually, the court registered this problematic term as Blanqui’s profession. As we know, proletari means the one who only procreates, has no access to the symbolic sphere, and is deprived of voice. To “[n]ame of anyone … who does not belong to the class order and is thereby the virtual dissolution of that order.”379 This is the basis of the distribution of the sensible made by the defendant. When he says, “if it is my duty, my duty as a proletarian deprived of all the rights of the city, to reject the competence of a court where only the privileged,”380 the name “proletarian” becomes the name of a new political subject. Blanqui assumes the discourse of conflict between the rich and the poor popular in his era, but he extracts it from the matrix of social conflict and positions in the matrix of political struggle. Rancière comments: “the class war is not the economic reality underlying the forms of politics. It is the heart of politics itself ” (ETP 386).381 In the courtroom, there is a clash between police

378 See M. Paz, Un Révolutionnaire professionnel, Auguste Blanqui, Paris: Fayard 1984; J. N. Tardy, L’Âge des ombres. Complots, conspirations et sociétés secrètes au XIXe siècle, Paris: Les Belles Lettres 2015, ch. “Le Conspirateur fanatique: Blanqui.” 379 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 88. Fr. “Nom de n’importe qui … ceux qui n’appartiennent pas à l’ordre des classe et sont par là-​même la dissolution virtuelle de cet ordre.” 380 The Blanqui Reader: Political Writings, 1830–​1880, eds. P. Le Goff and P. Hallward, trans. P. Le Goff, P. Hallward, and M. Abidor, London and New York: Verso 2018, p. 8. 381 Fr. “La guerre des classes n’est pas la réalité économique sous-​tendant les formes de la politique. Elle est le cœur de la politique elle-​même.”

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and political logics, which will repeat in the future in different circumstances. Thus, we may consider Blanqui’s figure –​as Miguel Abensour does in Les passages Blanqui382 –​as an emblem of the twentieth-​century political thought and philosophy of history. After 1830, in France appeared an abundance of publications on the equality of all French people, which consider the issue from a similar perspective. They analyze the contradiction between the propositions of the syllogism. The larger premise proclaims the equality of all French people, according to the Preamble of the Charter of 1830. The minor premise from direct experience states the actual existence of inequality. However, there are two different ways to view this contradiction. We can consider that the legal-​political discourse is an illusion, and the proclaimed egalitarianism is only a mask of inequality. However, such demystification may lead to generalized disbelief in public institutions, thus opening the way to the world of “cynical twilight” in which, as Peter Sloterdijk writes, there is an “integrated, asocial character” characterized by “subliminal illusionlessness.”383 Following the example of the revolted workers, we can also try to reconcile the two premises by changing one of them. In place of the opposition between discourse and fact (form and reality) comes the opposition of two facts and two types of discourse, which builds the space for polemic (OS 46-​47). Thusly understood, emancipation is not based on creating a counter-​power but on manifesting equality. It extracts individuals and groups from the otherworld of inarticulate noise and positions them in a shared world of meaning and visibility (OS 48). Other emancipatory movements follow a similar action pattern. Early feminism begins with the question “is a Frenchwoman a Frenchman?” This points to “a logical flaw that reveals the tricks of social inequality”.384 The absence of women in the classical equality discourse that has been developing since the Enlightenment surfaces as a cognitive scandal. The fact that natural human rights are granted only to men and that women are not treated as political subjects finds no grounding in law. To change the distribution of these rights, facts, and discourses must be confronted, and many social relations must be reformulated,

382 M.  Abensour, Les Passages Blanqui –​Walter Benjamin entre mélancolie et révolution, Paris: Sens and Tonka 2013. 383 P.  Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. M. Eldred, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press 1987, p. 5. 384 Rancière, Aux bords du politique, p. 87. Fr. “Une Française, est-​elle un Français? (…) une faille logique qui dévoile elle-​même les tours de l’inégalité sociale.”

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namely family structure or the division between private and public. Olympe de Gouges’s syllogism in Article X of her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen proclaims that “woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”385 Feminist-​oriented critique tends to argue that this model is too general. Rancière does not point to a specific system of domination, such as patriarchy, so the latter remains –​in agreement with its talent for mimicry –​an invisible element in the global geopolitical arrangement.386 Moreover, Rancière is to reason in the anachronistic categories of woman as a defeminized subject, aspiring to universality, and forget about the “room of one’s own,” meaning material and economic issues.387 Furthermore, Rancière overestimates the revolutionary gesture, whereas most subjectifications operate on the principle of growth, reiteration, and duplication rather than surprising rupture,388 and it is in this domain that the basic stakes of the emancipatory struggle should be located. It seems symptomatic that most of these objections concern not so much alleged blindness to gender as the strategic orientation of the reflection: Rancière focuses neither on authority structures nor on the mechanisms of reproducing subordination, nor on the “basic” conditions that determine exclusions, but he instead seeks to reconstruct the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory gesture, of establishing a non-​rapport with the given distributions of the sensible. In the same way  –​without any reference to the specific issues considered by postcolonial theory389  –​Rancière interprets the dynamics of anti-​racist

385 O. de Gouges, “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,” in: The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, trans. and ed. L. Hunt, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press 1996. See also M. Foerster, La Différence des sexes à l’épreuve de la République, Paris: L’Harmattan 2003, p. 23 ff. 386 S. Calkin, “Healthcare not airfare! Art, abortion and political agency in Ireland,” Gender, Place and Culture 3/​2019, p. 340. 387 Birnbaum, Egalité radicale, p. 158. To explain this omission, the author uses, among other things, generational and biographical arguments; Rancière, like many of his contemporaries, missed 1968 and continues to theorize in Marxist terms without opening his vocabulary to other languages of emancipation (p. 112). 388 H. Sparks, “Quarreling with Rancière: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Democratic Disruption,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 4/​2016, p. 430. 389 Scholars often point out Rancière’s reluctance to theorize about the raced and enslaved body, his lack of references to postcolonialism, and his uncritical Eurocentrism. For an interesting case study that resists this theory in the category of “Coloured Person” in apartheid South Africa as a violent disidentification that generates a need for strong

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movements. For him, their symbol remains the gesture of Rosa Parks, who in 1955 took the seat reserved for whites on the bus, recognizing that she has the right to do so as a citizen of the United States (HD 61).390 There is a reformulation of partitions into public and private everywhere. In these war games, the stake remains the de-​privatization of certain spheres of social life (wage relations, family relations, or social security) and their incorporation into the structure of collective life. None of these encounters allows for a reduction to purely economic issues:  “Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity” (D 11). Political action generates a subject entirely non-​identical with itself and the proper place for its crystallization is in texts, sentences, proper names, and common names. Words that have no determined designates but point to the very confusion involved in the relation of signs and states (NoH 92–​93), which are never contiguous regarding one another, albeit they simulate that contiguousness. The Aventine Hill plebeians, the struggling workers, or the representatives of discriminated ethnic minorities do not simply form a new social class but act as if in the order of language there existed something that does not exist in the given distribution of the sensible. They simultaneously point to the existence of the principle of equality and their own non-​existence in the police world. They introduce the unthought-​of into the sphere of experience and create new visibility, which modifies the regime of the sensible according to the saying: “revealing a thing in another thing” (D 56). Therefore, the dialogism of politics inevitably relies on literary heterology, and its invention comes to fruition in acts both argumentative and poetic (D 59).

identification, see W. Fourie, C. Venter, “Coloured Opera and the Violence of Dis-​ identification,” in: Rancière and Music, pp. 156–​169. 390 Some claim that the example is rather unfortunate, since Parks’s protest was not an ostentatious gesture of resistance, rather a part of an organized protest against public transportation in Montgomery. See H. Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage and Activist Women,” Hypatia 12/​1997, pp. 74–​110; Feola, The Powers of Sensibility, p. 87. We may agree with these objections, but it is difficult to accept the resulting generalizations, according to which Rancière moves in the direction of pure fortuity, in the end encountering, as L. McNay argues in The Misguided Search for the Political, Polity, Malden 2014, p. 176, a “quasimystical notion of the political [that] has no sense of the importance of working from within the system to create conditions for greater equality, nor of how to sustain counter-​hegemonic political challenge beyond the initial moment of demand.”

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The Nights of Labor The Nights of Labor is a work of original reflection on equality and emancipation.391 As in La Parole ouvrière, a collection of commentaries on workers’ pamphlets from 1830–​1851, in The Nights of Labor Rancière operates as a historian digging through old newspapers like La Ruche populaire:  journal des ouvriers rédigé et publié par eux-​mêmes. He recounts the lives of emancipating workers, reconstructs their ideas, and quotes their poems, diaries, and articles. He rejects the conventional representations preserved on pages of history books, but he also avoids treating them following the scheme of suspicion: I am not talking exactly about scratching the images in the accustomed ways. I am not talking about the old political approach that unmasks the painful reality underneath the flattering surface. Nor am I talking about the modesty of the historian and the new-​look politics that invites us to look under the varnish of heroic paintings and see the circulating blood of a life that is simultaneously more savage and more tranquil. We are not going to scratch images to bring truth to the surface; we are going to shove them aside so that other figures may come together and decompose there (NL 10).

Rancière emphasizes the validity of these old texts, which stems from the fact that “the equality of intelligences remains the most timeless thought that one can nourish on the social order”.392 He searches various textual manifestations for l’égalité des intelligences, the affirmation of the creative abilities of all those who were assigned to the world of work and not to the world of ideas and beauty. Therefore, he composes no history of workers’ thought, which is still waiting for its Homer, and which would happen between the history of social doctrines (Marx, Fourier, Proudhon) and the history of workers’ life. Instead, Rancière investigates how in these countless statements happens the reconfiguration of the sensible, the redefinition of community, and the establishment of new subjects; in short, he analyzes the political moments that emerge in the space of aesthetic revolution. The Nights of Labor deconstructs the Marxist idea of the working class, its plebeian or proletarian purity. Proletarians are by no means a separate class; we can distinguish the source of their separateness neither in economics nor culture,

391 B. Lerner, “Rancière’s Nineteenth Century: Equality and Recognition in “Nights of Labor,” in: Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism, ed. P. M. Bray, New York and London 2017. 392 J. Rancière, La Parole ouvrière, Paris: La Fabrique 2007, p. 342. Fr. “L’égalité des intelligences reste la plus intempestive des pensées que l’on puisse nourrir sur l’ordre social.”

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nor in any specific social relations. Everything is resolved in scattered verbal moments transformed into a tool for asserting their identity, a call to close ranks, and to fight.393 In an earlier article from Les Révoltes logiques, Rancière clarifies that “there is no single ‘voice of the people’. There are broken, polemical voices, each time dividing the identity they present.”394 Conceptual classifications immobilize the dynamic and substantialize the ephemeral: The reality denoted by the terms ‘worker,’ ‘people’ or ‘proletarian’ could never be reduced either to the positivity of a material condition nor to the superficial conceit of an imaginary, but always designated a partial (in both senses) linkage, provisional and polemical, of fragments of experience and forms of symbolization … a polemical configuration of ways of acting, ways of seeing and ways of speaking.395

Workers’ emancipation was not the expression of a distinct identity or culture; it was not a struggle for the rights of a pre-​existing and independent class. It was also not a process of gaining class consciousness, namely moving from ignorance to knowledge. It was a technique for crossing the boundaries that define identity. The events and texts that determine the direction of this movement are by no means a story about how bodies produce voices; on the contrary, they stage a process in which immaterial voices gradually mark out a common space for bodies. Let us begin with an elementary matter, namely the stakes of the emancipatory game. Rancière argues that material issues were secondary to issues of representation and identity, the shaping of perceptual data, and the relationship between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. Sometimes the two went hand in hand, as in the desiderata of striking Parisian tailors in 1833, who demanded “relations with superiors based on independence and equality,” but the general formula contained three specific demands: the right to a smoking break, the right to a reading break, and that the factory owner take off his hat when entering the workshop (NL 41). The last one reveals that liberation meant producing such customs, ways of feeling, forms of thinking, and language that would transform workers into equal participants in collective life. Nineteenth-​century proletarians felt above all trapped in a vicious circle of work and rest. To work during the day, to sleep at night –​this is their proper servitude, this is how their bodies and minds are captured, inscribed in the division of time and space, relegated outside the community of thoughts and feelings. 393 Rancière, La Parole ouvrière, Paris 2007, p. 8. 394 Rancière, Staging the People, ebook version, n.p. 395 Rancière, Staging the People, ebook version, n.p.

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In the foreword to The Nights of Labor, Rancière asks who the characters in this book are, and he answers: Who are they? A few dozen or hundred laborers in their twenties around 1830, who decided, each for himself, just about that time that they would no longer tolerate the intolerable. What they found intolerable was not exactly the poverty, the low wages, the uncomfortable housing, or the ever-​present specter of hunger. It was something more basic: the anguish of time shot every day working up wood or iron, sewing clothes, or stitching footwear …; the humiliating absurdity of having to go out begging, day after day, for this labor in which one’s life was lost (NL vii).

Night remains the symbolic setting for this transformation:  a synonym for those hours full of illuminations, stolen from rest, taken out of the mechanical succession of work and sleep. As we know, night “is for sleeping;” police of all eras says so. However, some break this prohibition and reach for the privilege of thinking and dreaming: The topic of this book is, first of all, the history of those nights snatched from the normal round of work and repose. A harmless and imperceptible interruption of the normal round, one might say, in which our characters prepare and dream and already live the impossible: the suspension of the ancestral hierarchy subordinating those dedicated to manual labor to those who have been given the privilege of thinking. (NL viii).

On the pages of The Nights of Labor live dozens of characters at the mercy of poverty, uncertainty, and humiliation who nevertheless reach for the pen, engage in utopian projects of social repair, and seek a vision of a different world in literature. Although they often complain about poverty and injustice in their texts, they generally agree that the greatest suffering relates to the sense of stolen time, with the discovery that their lives are spent in monotonous activities that only serve to preserve their lives. The aim of their struggle is not the right to laziness but to participate in the world of ideas and beauty, to form the common world. It is not about the right to become rich; the characters of The Nights of Labor become aware that “in the order of consumption as in the order of production, the problem is not to possess ‘one’s own object but to possess oneself ’” (NL 85). Their emancipation –​most probably any emancipation –​is primarily a “reappropriation of time.”396 These aspirations find their fullest expression in the works of Louis-​Gabriel Gauny –​carpenter and parquet worker, writer and philosopher –​which Rancière edited, separately published, and annotated with a preface (Louis-​Gabriel

396 Rancière, Les temps modernes, p. 33.

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Gauny:  le philosophe plébéïen, 1983). Gauny persistently seeks liberation from the “prison of work,” he understands well that he will not obtain freedom either through gestures of rupture or in acts of destruction. He develops an “economy of freedom,” which he calls the monastic economy (économie cénobitique). It is based on a planned reduction of bodily needs –​anyway difficult to fulfill due to lack of resources –​reinforcement of “the spiritual force of revolt” (NL 119), and privatization of the path that leads to liberation. Further sections of this economy described in detail by Gauny include reducing needs and related expenses –​thus minimizing work time –​and penetrating thesauri of literature, art, and philosophy that gather testimonies to the power of the human spirit. “The beautiful leisure I had there elucidated in me the holy equality in its pure reason and unleashed the rebel in me,” Gauny writes in 1851, when he temporarily serves as a watchman at Lyon station.397 Rancière is interested precisely in what Gauny calls “beaux loisirs.” The joy that comes from the wordplay, the images, and the ideas cannot be reduced to the matter of amusement or leisure; it introduces the dominated people into a different sensorium, significantly changes their whole world, and indicates ways out of subordination relations. However, the workers’ word holds yet another function:  argumentative-​ diversionary. Workers speak not to lament their fate or threaten their oppressors. They speak to be understood. They seem to repeat: “We are no rebels, and what we say is fair and reasonable.” They do not ask for favors, they do not promote philanthropy, and they do not carry a revolutionary message, but they demand the recognition of proletarians’ condition, and as much as possible, the reduction of domination relations. The work of argument combines here with conceptual diversion. What happens is the “decoding of the bourgeois discourse” in a process by which words “reverse and duplicate themselves” by undergoing many redefinitions and corrections. Order means the end of exploitation, property –​the workers’ joy of their labor, family –​the end of inheritance rights and the selfishness of the bourgeois unit, and so on. This “duplication of language” shows the characteristics of a gigantic quid pro quo, but nevertheless, it turns out to be an effective struggle for the appropriation of concepts, a sabotage on enemy territory, or a hostile takeover. Improvised speech strategies extract words from rules of their typical application, which evokes dissensus:  at their center lies “the word that interrupts,” the reversal of the word of power, or the transfer

397 J. Rancière, Louis-​Gabriel Gauny: le philosophe plébéien, Paris: PU Vincennes 1983, p. 175. Fr. “Les beaux loisirs que j’y possédais ont élucidé en moi la sainte égalité dans sa raison pure et déchainé le rebelle.”

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of the word from one sphere to a completely different one (MT 69–​71). Thus, this subversion implies three elements: the refusal to submit to imposed categories (a proletarian thoughtcrime), the intentional misrepresentation of terms, and the appropriation of symbolic means, namely the appropriation of the words of scholars and poets that question the position public discourses assign to plebeians. In this arrangement, the workers’ word functions both as a revindication of equality and its proof.398 This does not at all mean a belief in verbal magic or in the creative power of words. Proletarian declarations and fantasies are the basis of action and the object of practical verification. They are a self-​affirmation that holds the power of performativity, of which Judith Butler writes: it is thanks to self-​affirmation that the self-​making of the subject begins.399 In this sense, Gauny and his companions remain our contemporaries. The workers’ dilemmas resonate with the ambivalence felt by today’s precariat. As Patrick Cingolani proves, irregular work and payment indeed endanger the sense of security and durability of interpersonal bonds, but they simultaneously turn our attention away from consumption and encourage us to question the dominant models of success and seek different formulas of spirituality.400 Above all, if we return to the generalizations constructed by Rancière, little has changed in the fundamental issue: even today “the narrow path of emancipation passes between an acceptance of separate worlds and the illusion of consensus” (OS 50), while the territory it crosses is a virtual yet not illusory space of common meaning. The virtuality of another world invalidates the boundary between reality and fantasy, neutralizing the police order by introducing the unthinkable. At the same time, as we read in La Mésentente, this virtuality that surfaces in artistic appearance is lost in utopian thinking (M 87–​89). There is a reason why we ascribe two contradictory etymologies to the word utopia: “non-​place” and “happy place.” They project the universal happiness that comes to fruition in the separated, insular domain of fantasy. Utopias encourage us to abandon “spatial” thinking (borders, boundaries, territories, divisions) and locate the ideal in an isolated place, in the future or in parallel temporality, as in uchronia. All utopias, not excluding utopian socialism, are discourses that postulate annulling politics, suggesting that democratic or egalitarian conflict stems from misunderstanding,

398 J. Rancière, La Parole ouvrière, Paris 2007, p. 153. 399 J. Butler, “We, the People: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly” in: A. Badiou, et al., What Is a People? 400 P.  Cingolani, Révolutions précaires. Essai sur l’avenir de l’émancipation, Paris: La Découverte 2014, pp. 59–​69.

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that the only rescue from an infernal hic et nunc can come from a radical rupture and the ex nihilo creation of a new order. In light of this repeatedly expressed aversion to utopianism, the second part of The Nights of Labor devoted to the supporters of Saint-​Simonianism seems even more interesting. This term is used to describe the doctrine of the students of Claude Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-​Simon (1760–​1825). Scholars usually portray Saint-​Simon as the founder of utopian socialism, while he perceived himself both as a social reformer and a messiah. Indeed, Saint-​Simon came a long way from the New Encyclopedia project to the idea of a new universal Christianity. He based his idea of total social reform on the simple observation that there are two social classes: the class of “idlers” (aristocrats and landowners) and the class of “producers,” namely all kinds of producers, from farmers to scientists. The future, which will belong to the second group, will begin with the abolition of birthright privileges and the establishment of individual competencies as the only measure that determines position in the social pyramid. This pyramid must be rationally designed, for only reason can restrain the natural human tendency to dominate others. The society of the future must be managed rationally, according to science. In later years, Saint-​Simon complements the Enlightenment ideas he set forth in his early writings with a messianic theme: “I am convinced that I myself am performing a divine mission when I remind the Peoples and the Kings of the true spirit of Christianity.”401 In this way, Condorcet’s heritage merged with the tradition of eighteenth-​century theosophists and illuminists, with millenarianism and the heresy of “new Christianity.” According to the latter, Christ’s teachings  –​reduced to the principle of fraternal love among equals  –​ foretells humanity’s near future. However, Rancière does not thoroughly interpret Saint-​Simon’s writings but describes the life of his bold ideas, which in the 1930s underwent various transformations in the activity of “apostles of the new faith”  –​Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin and Saint-​Amand Bazard –​in whose teachings the utopia of holistic reform transforms into the dogmatism of faith, and Saint-​Simon himself into a savior figure. Ideas of the sanctification of work, science, and industry mix in their views with radical demands for the liberation of women, abolition of monogamy, and “rehabilitation of the body.” Bizarre rituals performed at the Ménilmontant estate –​such as switching of clothes between representatives of different social classes –​caused a sensation but also discredited the movement,

401 C.-​H.  Saint-​Simon, Social Organization: The Science of Man and Other Writings, trans. F. Markham, New York: Harper and Row 1964, p. 114.

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as did the search for the woman-​messiah. However, what seems more interesting than the content of these subversive ideas is their very circulation and their susceptibility to changes and unexpected transmutations. In fact, the most important element remains the transformative effect, the transformative power of the dream of universal brotherhood, the moment of conversion. Just as in the book about Gauny, the focus is “perhaps not the belief but the initiation that allows one to enter the circle of those who break the rule imposed by Plato on the workers”.402 Thus, it tells the story of the life of ideas formed spontaneously at that time and of the lives of people who adopted them in an utterly anarchic way and changed their own fate. Interestingly, origins play a secondary role here, as the very same ideas can incite upper classes to revolt. Rancière describes the adventures of the members of Mission de l’Est in his later book of essays Courts voyages au Pays du peuple. It is a group of enthusiasts who try to transform their behavior so that they do not reproduce the bourgeois model. They decide to live solely from the work of their hands, they unite with the workers through a practical transformation of habits and thoughts, and they apply themselves in the doctrine of industry and love.403 We might say that Rancière’s aversion to utopia accompanies a weakness for utopians. There is no point in considering the legacy of utopian socialism as a liberating project. We must agree with Walter Benjamin’s thought that “the Saint-​ Simonians had little sympathy for democracy.”404 However, their noble fantasies were part of a feedback loop: they were the product of a society of excitement, simultaneously intensifying the fever and agitation of social molecules. According to this mechanism, “democratic action creates its own utopian horizon,” but utopia solidifies into “the will to transform the forms of democratic disembodiment into forms of a new collective body.”405 As such, utopia is sometimes the object of fascination and reluctancy, sometimes accepted or denied. What proves

402 Rancière, Louis-​Gabriel Gauny, p. 9. Fr. “Mais l’essentiel, ce n’est peut-​être pas la croyance, c’est l’initiation. C’est de pénétrer dans le cercle de ceux qui brisent la règle imposée par Platon aux artisans.” 403 J. Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, trans. J. Swenson. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003, pp. 25–​28. 404 W.  Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin, Cambridge: The Belknap Press 1999, p. 593. 405 Rancière, Noudelmann, “La communauté comme dissentiment,” p. 98. Fr. “C’est l’action démocratique qui crée son horizon utopique, de la même façon que la démocratie des mots suscite le communisme de la langue. L’utopie est la volonté de transformer les formes de la désincorporation décoratique en formes d’un nouveau corps collectif.”

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it are histories of complicated relations between workers and Saint-​Simonians. Plebeian philosophers and proletarian poets many times noticed they encounter descriptions of a non-​place, so they chose a different work: they devoted themselves to assembling words and images to reconfigure the visible and the possible. They opened a subversive flow of combinations that involved transposing utopias, adopting literary models, and playing with common concepts. Rancière says sententiously that “the crooked line of illusion and the imaginary is not allowed to be put in opposition to the straight line of knowledge and action” (NL 113). The social utopians destroy this weave: they argue that we must build a happy tomorrow in our now, and we must find a place for this non-​place in our here. Their thinking is governed by the identity logic of places and functions. In a way, to take the Saint-​Simonians seriously is an act of intellectual courage. After all, this is a millenarian sect that generates obscure ideas and bizarre rituals. We must consider the polemical dimension of this gesture. Olivier Davis comments on this theme of The Nights of Labor as follows: All this is in an attempt to reveal a far greater degree of internal complexity to workers’ self-​understandings than was conventionally acknowledged, particularly perhaps by some etablis, those middle-​class gauchiste intellectuals of the early 1970s who had ‘established’ themselves in factories in search of an authentic encounter with working-​ class existence, which they presumed to be radically different from their own as intellectuals.406

Thus, it would be a description of the inner complication of the workers’ movement, the hybridization of ideas, and the multiplicity of attitudes. However, this gesture does not seem to be aimed exclusively at soixante-​huitards seeking proletarian purity. We shall remember that the book was written shortly after Rancière’s break with the Althusser school. Therefore, we may understand the shift to the disjointed stream of workers’ proclamations and poetry as an escape from Marxism in all its doctrinal varieties. Of course, Marx’s attitude toward Saint-​Simon remains a matter of dispute: some emphasize the link between utopian socialism and scientific socialism (optimistic historiosophy, theory of class struggle), others call Saint-​Simon an “anti-​Marx,” interested solely in a phantasmagorical social reform yet marginalizing the issue of political action.407 What attracts Rancière in the history of this movement (or, rather, the histoires de vie of its followers) is a certain non-​formation, a state of unreadiness, a protean

406 Davis, Jacques Rancière, p. 55. 407 G. Gurvitch, “Saint-​Simon et Karl Marx,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 14.53–​ 54.3–​4/​1960; Ch.  Prochasson, Saint-​Simon ou l’anti-​Marx, Paris: Perrin 2005.

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quality: it is a dream of a different world, which despite assuming a holistic and collective form, above all allows individuals to emerge from a state of subordination. In the space of the multiple, mutually inscrutable explorations (both of ideas and modi vivendi) there happens the work of shifting borders, the great improvisation of a new distributing and making-​communal. This is where the “non sumus, non existumus” resounds best, in that initial moment before the consciousness of the “international proletariat” forms. Let us recall a detail that Walter Benjamin notes in The Arcades Project: Notable difference between Saint-​Simon and Marx. The former fixes the number of exploited as high as possible, reckoning among them even the entrepreneur because he pays interest to his creditors. Marx, on the other hand, includes all those who in any way exploit another –​even though they themselves may be victims of exploitation –​among the bourgeoisie.408

The third part of The Nights of Labor reconstructs such processes. Rancière reports on the first unsuccessful attempts to acquire a coherent conception of the working class by eliminating foreign elements and distilling proletarian specificity. Activists and publicists of the journal L’Atelier argued vigorously that real proletarians have nothing in common with the conventional image of the simple-​minded plebeian who drinks oneself into a stupor at a fête populaire. While establishing a “moral religion of fraternity” in the spirit of reborn Catholicism, they simultaneously defend the idea of a “purely people’s party.” Their credo sounds remarkably like the statements of belief and invocations of the communists of La Fraternité and materialists of L’Humanitaire (NL 266–​267). Everywhere, there is the same inhibition of thought circulation, an ideological ossification dictated by the phantasm of class purity. We may draw different conclusions from the adventure of Étienne Cabet and his students, which happened in the 1840s and 1850s after the Saint-​Simonist and Fourierist movements had already ceased operations. Inspired by More’s Utopia, Cabet creates in his famous Voyage en Icarie (1842) a vision of a harmonious community based on strictly enforced Christian-​communist principles. The book seduced many dreamers and adventurers who were willing to start risky endeavors and build a brave new world. In 1849, Cabet landed in New Orleans with nearly five hundred followers. Les Icariens founded many colonies: in the states of Texas, Iowa, California, and Illinois. Rancière tells the dramatic story of the latter:  from its heroic beginnings to the internal crisis, the rebellion of

408 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 578.

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some settlers, the death of Cabet, and the dismantling of the community during the American Civil War. The cause of this entropy was the forgetting of political energy and engagement in police regulations, ultimately resulting in the reconstruction of the class system: it began with the distinction between true and false Icarians –​the poor who had nothing to lose, the curious bourgeois who wanted to spend their vacations in Ikaria, or the ordinary troublemakers –​and ended with barrack discipline, constant supervision, and open conflict between antagonized classes. We may describe the fall of this Communauté de Biens as a clash with reality (above all, economic reality as the colonies of Ikaria were inefficient in terms of production)409 or as the result of an embodied contradiction: the instauration of a non-​egalitarian logic in an equalitarian community founded in the name of “unlimited liberty” and “absolute equality” (NL 386). The successful sovereignty of the protagonists of the first two parts of The Nights of Labor was something entirely different. Rancière draws a more general conclusion from the adventure of their lives in “From Politics to Aesthetics?:” “the core of the emancipation of the workers was an aesthetic revolution. And the core of that revolution was the issue of time” (FPA 14). The revolt that was born in night-​time scenery (against the imposed division of time) brought a transformation of the sensorium, which turned existing social relations upside down. It is tempting to ask about the aestheticization of politics. In the final sections of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin presents the situation in which the mass looks itself in the face during a triumphal parade as a manifestation of the aestheticization of political life. This was possible due to a complex historical process: an artwork became the object of technical reproduction, which reduced its uniqueness and authenticity, leading to the loss of its aura, meaning the resulting presence of an object in time and space. The loss of distance in reception characterizes the era of the masses, which contributes to the blurring of boundaries between art and reality. Although art emancipates itself from religion, it undergoes another transformation: instead of finding its foundations in the original, it finds support in politics. This is where fascism enters with its unbreakable will to “supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology;” the will that must lead to war as the highest fulfillment of l’art pour l’art.410 The fascist aestheticization of politics 409 R. P. Sutton, Les Icariens: The Utopian Dream in Europe and America, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1994, chapters “The “Communauté de Biens” at Nauvoo” and “The Schism.” 410 W.  Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Scottsdale: Prism Key Press 2012, p. 37.

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and the communist politicization of art: this is the chiasmatic figure outlined by Benjamin absent from Rancière’s reflection; only its second element appears in Rancière’s thought under the name of “paradoxes of engagement.” Does Rancière not commit an idealistic oversight about the dangers of the totalitarian formula “Fiat ars –​pereat mundus,” thus forming a blind spot in his reflection? On the contrary, Rancière is conscious of his omissions, as he understands that the conceptual net he creates profiles his own insight. He refers to Benjamin’s thesis in several places, repeating more or less the same thing. Politics is not aesthetics just because it uses a given medium that is proper to art in order to find supporters. Politics is aesthetics because it presupposes a distribution of the sensible that indicates whether and how bodies form a community (ME 37–​39). In other words, the supposed aestheticization of politics is the derivation of politics from its proper domain of aisthesis into police projects of social order and the specifically constructed image of the mass. Similarly, based on this vocabulary, it makes no sense to ask (as Ernesto Laclau does) whether Rancière over-​identifies politics with emancipatory politics without considering other possibilities, such as fascism.411 Politics happens when there is a redistribution of places and identities, visibility and invisibility, noise and speech, meaning a reconfiguration in the distribution of the sensible. “There is thus an aesthetics at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the aestheticization of politics. This aesthetics should not be understood as the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art, by a consideration of the people qua work of art” (POA 13). Notably, the above example perfectly illustrates the logic of la mésentente, when the interlocutors say the same words but mean different things. A similar situation happens even more often in another dispute, namely the one that revolves around Rancière’s understanding of democracy.

The Incalculable The term “democracy” appears in Rancière’s writings in very different contexts, twice becoming the subject of a separate study, in La Mésentente and Hatred of Democracy. The term partakes in a peculiar game of concepts that raises many objections among commentators. Nonetheless, let us begin with a caveat: Rancière is not a theorist of democracy. He refers to the corpus of canonical texts in this field in a selective and

411 Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 246.

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capricious manner. He takes the position of a provocateur, a communication exploiter, trying to flip the table and dictate his rules of the game. Of course, he is not alone in this role; we can easily point to thinkers who inspired this revolutionary gesture, especially Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. Nevertheless, Rancière stages the disagreement in an original way: he argues that dispute is about a designate, the argued itself, and points to a democracy that has nothing to do with the “democracy” that is the focus of political philosophy. Here is a sample of such an action: We do not live in democracies. Neither, as certain authors assert –​because they think we are all subjected to a biopolitical government law of exception –​do we live in camps. We live in States of oligarchic law, in other words, in States where the power of the oligarchy is limited …. A “democracy” would be something like an “oligarchy” that leaves enough room for democracy to feed its passion (HD 73–​74).

As we see, in the last sentence the word “democracy” appears twice, the first time in the common (incorrect) sense and the second time in the specific (proper) sense. Let us briefly consider these two denotations. Let us begin with the common use of the word “democracy,” which is usually used to describe a democratic-​liberal system with representative government. The combination of these specific elements seems so obvious to us that we tend to forget their different genealogies and fail to see the tensions they generate to this day. The notion “liberal democracy” combines two different traditions between which there is no necessary relationship:  the liberal tradition of the rule of law, human rights, and individual freedoms, and the democratic tradition that conveys the unity of the rulers and the ruled as well as the sovereignty of the people. Liberalism’s correction introduced to democracy –​in its political and economic varieties –​boils down to defending individual right (the right to inequality) against the tyranny of the majority. Political theories of liberal democracy in the spirit of Rawls attempt to combine these two elements to design harmonious social relations. Thusly envisioned combination of “democracy” and liberalism blocks all dispute by pushing consensual solutions, fixes subjects in their established identities by forgetting that they are constructed in asymmetrical power relations and cycles of political subjectifications, and under the guise of pluralism, masks the inevitable error in estimation by making les sans-​part invisible. Notably, Rancière considers not how to replace liberal democracy with a different system of social organization. He does not at all seek better systemic solutions. Instead, Rancière suggests that we should keep the current constellation of sovereign powers, while bearing in mind the indispensable difference between democracy and liberalism and re-​evaluating that democratic element

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(without quotation marks this time), which constitutes the inner quality of the social arrangements we know and is subject to no institutionalization. Another matter concerns representative governments. As we know, they were not invented by democrats but by English and Swedish monarchist governments that allowed representatives of individual states to speak. It is one of the relatively late additions to the democratic tradition, which draws from the sources of the classical Greek system and the Roman republican tradition –​continued in the Italian medieval city-​states –​which supplements them with ideas of political equality and the institution of representative government. To understand the dynamics of this process, we must look back to the historically first model of democracy –​the one designed in ancient Greece –​and contrast it with what we today consider to be the democratic rule of law. It would certainly be fair to say that the model of government created in the course of the reforms of Solon (in the early sixth century BC), Cleisthenes (508–​507 BC), and Pericles (mid-​fifth century BC) is not what we would call democracy today. Notably, Athenian democracy was direct and participatory, meaning that decisions were made by a majority vote of citizens who considered their public duties as part of their civil entitlement rather than a privilege. However, the Greek demos meant all citizens of a Greek polis, which was a relatively small community, fairly homogeneous, and living in an autonomous city-​state. In absolute numbers, the demos comprised a minority of the entire population of city; according to some calculations, about fifteen percent of the population. For example, the number of Athenian citizens gathered in ekklesía in the era of Tukidides did not exceed five thousand. Therefore, the definition of citizenship was exclusive, conditioned by several exclusions:  metics (immigrant population), slaves, and women were denied access. As Robert Dahl writes, the Greeks “did not acknowledge the existence of universal claims to freedom, equality, or rights, whether political rights or, more broadly, human rights,” meaning that freedom was an attribute of membership, not humanity, of belonging to the polis, not the human species.412 Jan Sowa comments that ancient Greeks would certainly perceive the introduction of equality among all citizens as a great injustice. Slave labor, the pillar of their economic system, seemed as natural to them as the marginalization of women and foreigners. The rise of Greek democracy was linked

412 R. A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, New Haven: Yale University Press 1989, p. 22.

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to the rise of imperialism, colonial conquest, and domination of the conquered territories and peoples.413 What follows from these overly concise remarks? Certainly, that we cannot measure today’s democracy by the ancient standard without referring to the key correction made during the American and French Revolutions, which focused on the maximal expansion of the definition of citizenship that began to include the whole people. Greek democracy could only function because of the relatively small size of the community, the far-​reaching alignment of interests of free citizens, and the possibility of their participation in governing. Rancière suggests that we should not dream of a return to direct democracy. Indeed, as Slavoj Žižek writes, the parliamentary form ruins democracy by implying a passivity of the people.414 However, how do we contrast it with the model of unmediated citizen participation in the processes of governing? We can easily assess both the difficulties involved in putting this idea into practice and the risks that accompany its procedures. As Giovanni Sartori argues, any questions about direct democracy belong to that group of questions in which rational answers tend to contradict experimental ones.415 The indirect system of governance has advantages that are difficult to overestimate: a multi-​stage decision-​making process equipped with safety mechanisms that is absent in direct democracy; dynamic procedures that reduce dispute and turn it into a dialectics of diversity.416 In other words, direct democracy can work well at lower community levels (local, municipal, neighborhood, associational) as a supplement to the representative system. Rancière’s position on this issue seems rather peculiar. Of course, he would not praise consensus, but he simultaneously advocates no direct democracy. Rancière writes:  indeed, it was the Greeks “who severed links with the divine shepherd and set down, under the double name of philosophy and politics, the public record of this farewell” (HD 33), it was the Greeks who made the first gesture of breach with the logic of arche, which means both “beginning” and “principle.”417 They created a new system in which the proliferation of claims became possible; they set the stage for the emergence of new entities existing

413 J. Sowa, Ciesz się, późny wnuku! Kolonializm, globalizacja i demokracja radykalna, Kraków: Ha!art 2008, pp. 36–​43. 414 S. Žižek, “From Democracy to Divine Violence,” in: Democracy in What State?, p. 101. 415 G.  Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham: Chatham House Publishers 1987, vol. 2, p. 280. 416 Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Vol. 1, pp. 90–​92. 417 See H. Arendt, On Revolution, London: Penguin Books 1990, p. 213.

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in the interval between themselves and proper name. However, they also introduced into existing practices of governance an “improperness” that we are eager to forget, which lies the heart of politics and democracy. What is this improperness? The Greeks recognized seven sources of power: the first four related to birth, which entailed the power of parents over children, the old over the young, masters over slaves, and the well-​born over the commoners. Two principles derived from the “law of nature:” the power of the strong over the weak and (only legitimate for Plato) the wise over the foolish. The seventh power was “favor of the gods,” which entailed the drawing of lots. It was supposed to protect democracy from a situation, in which the rulers become those who lust for power, which leads to factionalism, demagogy, manipulation, populism, and a degeneration of democracy, to its transformation into an oligarchy, the rule of the aristoi or a new elite. The drawing of lots could only work in the Athenian model of democracy, in which people were chosen from among a small group of citizens, and each of them eventually performed some public function, while the performed functions were assigned randomly. The idea that today we could entrust the election of public officials to coincidence seems absurd, mainly because the person selected for a position might not have the necessary competencies. At the same time, the representative system does not at all guarantee that the people appointed have the appropriate knowledge and skills. Either way, political representation remains a deeply aristocratic rule.418 Rancière proposes no restitution of the archaic system. He uses the recognition of the entitlement associated with the “favor of the gods” for his conceptual game: this is the moment of the birth of politics. The order of “natural” principles is interrupted by the seventh power (erased in Gorgias, The Republic, and Laws), an entitlement that breaks the chain, indeed introducing a lack of entitlement (DOP 31): this points toward the democratic excess –​ the loss of moderation. This is the birth of “the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority” (HD 41). The power of birth, wealth, and customary relations of subordination are undermined. The drawing of lots breaks the naturalness of these relations and locates itself at the heart of democracy, which is not so much a “political regime” as a “regime of the political” (MP 58–​59).

418 “The principle of representation is an aristocratic principle which states that there are certain social classes which have more weight than others, and must be represented” (PA 20).

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This does not at all mean that democracy is a transitional state between an anachronistic form of police governance and politics of the future.419 We know nothing better than parliamentary democracy mostly because of the tensions it generates. Every election is both an affirmation of the equality of all citizens’ votes and a ritual for the reproduction of the dominant “political” class, namely party representation. Thus, Plato’s fear is fulfilled: politics is done by those who want it, which does not serve the public interest. However, this system persists in a state of imbalance because it rests on two contradictory logics. The first one assumes that the people are “silent,” meaning permanently deprived of access to “the legitimate word.” Hence the need for representation, the mediation of experts introducing the necessary distance of the people from themselves. The “fundamental, quasi-​metaphysical”420 principle described by Pierre Bourdieu here bears its fruit: in the political field resounds what say the people who would not speak at all if others would not speak for them. These advocates of the masses overwhelmed by impotence are actors acting not in direct relation to voters, but with each other, creating an autonomous microcosm.421 However, Rancière adds polemically that democratic excess is founded on the politics’ improperness, which exists only if there is a supplementary title for those who function in the ordinary run of social relations. The scandal of democracy, and of the drawing of lots which is its essence, is to reveal that this title can be nothing but the absence of title, that the government of societies cannot but rest in the last resort on its own contingency (HD 47).

After removing the foundation in the arche, every power must confront its own contingency. Democracy is precisely the power of “anyone,” which begins with the undermining of the power of birth and wealth, with the establishment of a government based on the absence of any title to rule. The mechanism of representative government hides this contingency but is unable to mask it completely, which generates irreducible anxiety about the legitimacy of power. Therefore, there are no “democratic societies,” or more precisely, they exist only as an “imaginary painting” or regulative utopias. In reality, we live in societies organized by the game of renewed oligarchy transformed by the electoral

419 M.  Gudelis, “Political Relationship as Politics and Democracy in Rancière’s ‘Ten Theses on Politics,’” International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology 1/​2011, p. 151. 420 P.  Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique, Lyon: Presses Universitaires Lyon 2000, p. 87. Fr. “La question fondamentale, quasi métaphysique.” 421 Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique, pp.  52–​57.

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process, which permanently strives to subordinate police to itself (PA 26). Thus, the term “representative democracy” transforms from a pleonasm into an oxymoron. The representative system is a mixed, democratic-​oligarchic form: born from oligarchy, transformed by democratic processes, reappropriated by the oligarchy, and so on. This brings us to the positive meaning of democracy that finally escapes quotation marks and italics. Above all, democracy is a permanent scandal: “It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority” (HD 41). Democracy is itself only if it is scandalous. Its dynamics involve negotiating the gap between the private and the public. As we know, the Latin privatus means “deprived” (from privare) and describes an incomplete existence, abstracted from social relations; the Greek equivalent of this word is ídion, opposed to koinón, by which “private individuals” –​idiótes –​are “those who are not in polítes, who are not citizens.”422 The movement of these boundaries realizes in two historical processes: it is about “the recognition, as equals and as political subjects, of those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings; and the recognition of the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth” (HD 55); the inclusion among voters those excluded by police logic; the struggle for the de-​privatization of wage relations and for the recognition of the right to work as part of the structure of collective life. Furthermore, the scandal of democracy consists in the fact that it introduces disorder, which is a derivative of “the irresistible growth of demands that put pressure on governments, lead to a decline in authority, and cause individuals and groups to become refractory to the discipline and sacrifices required for the common good” (HD 7). All governments of “democratic” countries must control the intensity of democratic life, thus becoming entangled in a double bind: they must control the double excess related to both collective activity (contestation of authority, knowledge, and competence of the authorities) and the withdrawal into private life, the search for individual fulfillment, followed by a decline of interest for the common good and a spiraling of demands. Their actions are doomed to failure because “democracy is the reign of excess” (HD 8). Hatred of Democracy is a polemic and a philippic. Rancière begins with the above mésentente to attack critics of democracy. He focuses on contemporary French philosophers and sociologists like Jean-​Claude Milner, Alain Finkielkraut, and others, but he also points to a long tradition of depreciating democracy.

422 Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, vol. 2, p. 285.

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Rancière returns to those of Plato’s works in which democracy appears as a dangerous multiplicity of arrangements, “the bazaar of systems, the harlequin’s robe,” the rule of individuals that means overturning the world order. Indeed, in The Republic (8.562–​563),423 we read that democracy is a series of reversals:  what ruins the natural order of things is the equation of rulers and ruled, men and women, parents and children, locals and foreigners, teachers and students, old and young, humans and animals. Democracy, then, would be a weird system just right for pleasure-​seekers, spoiled consumers who do not know the world of values, and finally the young. In the opinion of Alain Badiou, Plato suggests there exists a link between democracy, nihilism, and eternal adolescence, with the latter’s inherent qualities: “immediacy (only pleasure-​seeking exists), fashion (each present moment substitutable for any other), and stationary movement (on se bouge, to use a French idiom)”.424 It seems astonishing that these arguments are still repeated today, when we hear that democracy is the rule of the bazaar, the downfall of authority, and the cult of youth, that the democratic man “wants equality in everything, even in the unequal; not recognizing the difference between the necessary and the superfluous, he considers everything, including democracy, on the basis of desire, change or fashion” (OS 41). The portrait from two thousand years ago fits perfectly into the critical image of the postmodern individual, the schizophrenic personality of the consumer, whose natural habitat remains the democratic vanity market. This critique recurs in many variants. The republican version foregrounds obsession with uprooting, confusion of values, and disruption of the gender order. Sociology today writes about how society devours the state, which is a direction opposite to that of totalitarianism, in which the state devoured society, but with a similar result (HD 12). This critique seems possible thanks to a threefold operation: reducing democracy to a form of society, identifying this form with the egalitarian rule of the individual, subordinating the figure of “mass individualist society” to the imperative of growth, and inscribing it in the logic of capitalist economy (HD 20). Based on a mixing of concepts and orders, such a diagnosis can lead in two directions. First, in the direction of longing for strong governments grounded in unquestionable foundations of morality and rights, or what Robert Dahl calls “guardianship” associated with the “royal” ability in raising the human community (from Plato to B. F. Skinner).425 Second, one may

423 Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5–​6, trans. P. Shorey, London 1969. 424 A. Badiou, “The Democratic Emblem,” in: Democracy in What State?, pp. 14. 425 Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, pp.  52–​64.

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reverse pessimism in Lipovetsky gesture so as to affirm the neo-​narcissistic, sovereign individual who lives in a self-​serving society, which means –​as Rancière puts it ironically –​the betterment of the alienated consumer into a new Narcissus (HD 22). Regardless of the placement of emphasis (longing for an organized community/​apology of social entropy), this situation equates democracy with consumption. Philosophy and the social sciences misidentify here the figure of ochlos. By repeating this gesture, they negate the proper subject of democracy, the demos, which is “nothing but the movement whereby the multitude tears itself away from the weighty destiny which seeks to drag it into the corporeal form of ochlos …. Democracy exists in a society to the degree that the demos exists as the power to divide the ochlos” (OS 32). In other words, democracy comes to fruition in the rejection of the dominant contemporary synthesis of ochlocracy with its apparent opponent, epistemocracy, meaning the rule of the most intelligent. While ochlocracy functions at the level of consumption and individual life strategies, epistemocracy remains a technique of governing pleasure by employing as its tools population management, consensus building –​meaning the fiction of an extra-​political community based not on a redistribution of arche  –​ fear, and terror in proper politico-​medial way. This is exhaustively described by Marc Crépon in La Culture de la peur, in which he describes the strategies of the state that “makes insecurity its business … by ordering and prioritizing the different forms of threats.”426 To reiterate, democracy can exist in a momentarily manner (il y a de la démocratie) only in the contestation of “democracy.” Democracy’s way of being relies on being in conflict with itself, meaning with its own institutionalized form. Liberal democracy with a representative system is neither the essence of democracy nor its opposite, but rather an entanglement of opposites: an instrument of egalitarian struggles (when the formal declaration of equality is used in struggles for concrete reforms) and its effect (as these struggles contribute to the growth of formal equality), but also an opponent (when power grammaticalizes itself in oppressive or exclusionary forms).427 “Democracy” as we know it balances –​to borrow Dahl’s notion –​between aristocratic and democratic republicanism, each

426 M.  Crépon, La Culture de la peur. I. Démocratie, identité, sécurité, Paris 2008, p. 79. Fr. “[Etat] fait de l’insécurité son affaire … en ordonnant et en hiérarchisant les différentes formes de menaces.” 427 See H. R. Lauritsen, “Democracy and the Separation of Powers: A Rancièrean Approach,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 1/​2010.

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driven by a different fear: the former fears the rule of ochlos while the latter –​the domination of the oligarchic element, the new aristoi.428 Written without quotation marks, democracy proper rejects both the voice of the majority and the right of birth and wealth, affirming the pure randomness that makes individuals and nations themselves. Democracy attempts to build a common world based on that contingency. Therefore, it remains anarchic in a double sense of the word: it breaks with the logic of the arche and remains dispersed, in a permanent crisis of the symbolic order (CT 6-​7; DOP 34). What lies at the center of democracy is a gap that cannot be filled by any positivity like the positivity of the people. Any attempt to fill this vacancy,429 to eliminate the gap between the symbolic and the real contains the danger of sliding into totalitarianism. This constitutive tension is so disturbing that attempts continue to annihilate it, be it by contrasting formal and real democracy (in which the former has the status of a mere appearance, demanding to be abolished) or, on the contrary, by identifying democracy with the rule of law, human rights, parliamentary system, and consensus. Meanwhile, Rancière calls for the recognition that real democracy is the one that negates itself and reveals its own limitations without questioning its fundamental assumptions.430 Does this condemn democratic politics to the specific temporal modus of a moment? Some agree, if this were indeed the case, Rancière would only be offering us a theory of a momentary community declining into the police order. Then, he would write about anarchic rebellion doomed to failure and the everlasting return of inequality. At best, such a reading of Rancière could offer us an insurrectionary concept that celebrates local, dispersed, rebelling “pirate” communities in the spirit of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones.431 Meanwhile, Rancière formulates a double refusal:  politics sides neither with techniques and institutions of state governance nor with the “enlightened” fighter who identifies politics –​like technocrats –​with the matter of exercising power. Rancière needs not distinguish any “counter-​ democracy,” any force of doubt and rebellion that underlies the “democratic system.”432 The power of democratic politics is neither governance nor resistance 428 Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, p. 2. 4 29 Here Rancière approaches the theory of the void by Claude Lefort, conveyed in his L’Invention démocratique, Paris: Editions Fayard 1981. 430 J. Rancière, “La Poétique du savoir –​À propos de “Les noms de l’histoire,” La main de singe 11–​12/​1994. 431 H.  Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone:  Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Williamsburg: Autonomedia 2003. 432 P.  Rosanvallon, La Contre-​démocratie. La politique à l’âge de la défiance, Paris: Seuil 2006.

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but the implemented imperative of equality. The effects of political actions are inscribed –​inaccurately and non-​definitively –​in what these actions aim: rights and institutions. The democratic process is the movement of bringing back into play the universal, disrupting the purity of principles, and inventing new subjectification forms that reverse the privatization of public life (HD 62). It prevents police from the simple reproduction of forms of domination. A trace inscription of this process determines the gradual growth of rights and freedoms: Our situation is in every way preferable to that of the Scythian slaves. There is a worse and a better police –​the better one, incidentally, not being the one that adheres to the supposedly natural order of society or the science of legislators, but the one that all the breaking and entering perpetrated by egalitarian logic has most often jolted out of its “natural” logic (D 30–​31).

This fragment from La Mésentente concerns the relationship between police and politics. Thus, we should now ask what is the place of the term “democracy” in this vocabulary? How to situate it in this complex web of concepts, which includes a specific understanding of aesthetics, distinctions between different aesthetic regimes, and the distribution of the sensible? Rancière situates democracy on the same sublevel as “politics:” So, democracy is not a political regime in the sense that it forms one of the possible constitutions which define the ways in which people assemble under a common authority. Democracy is the very institution of politics itself –​of its subject and of the form of its relationship (DOP 32).

The above quotation exposes the fundamental flaw of this concept of democracy: it is nonoperational and perfectly redundant, because it duplicates the term “politics” in denotation and connotation.433 At this point, I must agree with Rancière’s critics, such as Gabriel Rockhill.434 Rancière’s rejection of a substantial conception of politics in favor of a dynamic one –​a transition from “being” to “event” –​allows him to break with the Marxist paradigm, especially its inherent conviction about the finality of history. We have no choice but to accept

433 Rancière himself puts the sign of equality: “Democracy is the power of all, no matter who they are, the power of the people who have nothing. Democracy is the true politics, because politics begins precisely when the people whom one assumes are not made for it start taking care of the community’s concerns, making decisions, explaining and showing that they can do it, that they have the ability to do it” (PA 19). 434 G. Rockhill, “La démocratie dans l’histoire des cultures politques,” in: Jacques Rancière et la politique de l’esthétique, eds. J. Game, A. Wald Lasowski, Paris:  Éditions des archives contemporaines 2009, pp. 55–​71. See also Birnbaum, Egalité radicale, p. 233.

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the selective historicism of this concept of politics, which once established in abstraction, fills with a variety of historical content. However, we cannot accept such a procedure in the case of democracy. By striving for a synonymous identification with politics, democracy loses any analytical function. Moreover, the pragmatics of the discourse on democracy turns out to be highly undemocratic: only a philosopher –​a Master, a Wise Man –​has the power to decide whether a given phenomenon is democratic or not. This pure discretion is to stem from epistemic supremacy:  the proper understanding of a general term. There is not a single trace of such conceptual transcendentalism in the works of Rancière the aesthetician, who thinks in terms of radical historicism. *** The paradoxes described above find their specific reflection in Philip Roth’s novel. The protagonists of The Counterlife search for identity in a world from which proper politics was banished and replaced by various forms of archipolitics (Zionism), parapolitics and post-​politics (the public sphere in the Western world), and metapolitics (terrorism). These forms act as gravitational fields that curve the trajectory of their search, making Henry and Nathan in their countless incarnations gravitate either toward the police order of identities fixated on ethnos, if not universal harm, or toward the consensual world of disputes and passions that were put out. Roth sacrifices his protagonists like Flaubert does with his heroine in Madame Bovary, the difference being that Roth punishes them for a different sin: for forgetting the dimension of potentiality, cramming their experience into a system of rigid oppositions (real man/​impotent; Jew/​goy), and failing to notice their self-​definitions are contingent and fleeting. The Counterlife reveals that biographical fictions are always lined with counter-​fictions and that life conceals a possible counterlife. Roth’s multi-​variant literary fiction has a liberating power. Like political fiction, it is an active narrative that is not simply an illusion but such a combination of meanings and feelings, thoughts and affects that deregulates time, re-​establishes parameters of space, and engenders a new “I” and a new “we.” At the same time, it clearly differs from “unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism”435 with its high self-​awareness, non-​schematicity, and unpredictability: Now, what distinguishes literary fiction is the fact that the reality of the situations and the linkage of the events cannot be supposed to be already known, that they are the object of an explicit construction. This is why avowed fiction, far from being the fantasy

435 Rancière, The Edges of Fiction, p. 8.

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that must be explained by the rational arguments of theory, politics or science, is more rational than the discourses that pretend to account for it. Literary fiction –​or avowed fiction in general –​is not so much the object that social science has to analyze as it is the laboratory where fictional forms are experimented as such and which, for that reason, helps us understand the functioning of the forms of unavowed fiction at work in politics, social science or other theoretical discourses.436

Roth confessed in an interview that The Counterlife changed everything: “It was an aesthetic discovery, how to enlarge, how to amplify, how to be free.”437 Thus, emancipation turns out to be linked to work in the field of aisthesis. Literature escapes the vicious circle of critique of ideology and engages in the task of “exercises in freedom.” Another duty of literature –​which Roth does not avoid –​ is to examine all those ideas and attitudes which, while promising liberation, act as traps that lock subjects in a vicious circle of hatred, resentment, helplessness, and melancholy. In the laboratory of fiction, we may experiment with the multiplicity of different narratives that block or liberate the thinking and practicing of equality.

4 36 J. Rancière, “Fictions of Time,” in: Rancière and Literature, p. 26. 437 Pierpont, Roth Unbound, p. 149.

IV Vicious  Circle Those who take the meat from the table Teach contentment. Those for whom the contribution is destined Demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry Of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men. –​Bertolt Brecht

The Platonic Lie In The Republic, Plato builds the original scene with several figures:  farmer, builder, weaver, cobbler. As time passes, other occupations appear in order to satisfy basic material needs. This is the city of rules, the city of necessities. Already in this text appears the principle of specialization: everyone must devote themselves to one activity according to their predispositions. Plato writes that “more things are produced, and better and more easily when one man performs one task according to his nature, at the right moment, and at leisure from other occupations” (The Republic 2.370c). The fact that each individual is ascribed to a certain type of activity follows directly from Plato’s theory of the soul. There are different types of desires –​those associated with appetite (the need for food, drink, pleasure, wealth), with spirit (the desire for honor and recognition), and with reason (the pursuit of knowledge and truth) –​ which determine the actions of different types of people. Hence, the rule “a shoemaker shall make shoes and nothing else” seems just. A farmer should not repair a roof or sew clothes. One cannot do more than one activity. Division of labor is the first element of prohibition and exclusion; the second is time: “the business will not wait upon the leisure of the workman, but the workman must attend to it as his main affair, and not as a by-​work” (The Republic 2.370b-​c). Time or, rather, the lack of time takes social rigor to a higher level. Plato does not write it is impossible to be a shoemaker and a citizen at the same time; he only specifies that one cannot be a shoemaker and a weaver at the same time. However, neither the shoemaker nor the weaver can hold state office, because they do not have the time for this, and yet “business is not disposed to wait.” This “lack of time” is a naturalized prohibition

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inscribed in forms of sensory experience. There can be no political phenomenon based on this original scene because politics appears when, as Rancière writes, “those who have no time” gain voice (AD 24). Plato designs three different models of the state. The first one is populated by producers, but it is exposed to external attacks and destabilized by pleonaxia, meaning the desire of possession. If there are guards in the state (model two), there must also be institutions to educate them; but here appears a risk of degeneration due to struggle for honor. Only in the third model do we see the ideal kallipolis, for here the philosophers appear. In a sense, this is a dialectical model in which “city-​l is ‘overcome but preserved’ in city-​2, and city-​2 in city-​3.”438 The ideal system about which we learn at the point of arrival is closely linked to the savior role of the wise men: “How, then … can it be right to say that our cities will never be freed from their evils until the philosophers, whom we admit to be useless to them, become their rulers?” (The Republic 6.487e). The philosopher figure appears here in a double character: he is simultaneously a wise man contemplating the essence and a guide. Such individuals are inevitably few, which is why they must be distinguished from false wise men, meaning sophists and cynics. The latter have no access to the truth as they are vulgar, driven by selfishness, and usurping privileges of others. By engaging in philosophy, they abandon their profession, thereby violating their vocation. just as men escape from prison to take sanctuary in temples, so these gentlemen joyously bound away from the mechanical arts to philosophy …. For in comparison with the other arts the prestige of philosophy even in her present low estate retains a superior dignity; and this is the ambition and aspiration of that multitude of pretenders unfit by nature, whose souls are bowed and mutilated by their vulgar occupations even as their bodies are marred by their arts and crafts (The Republic 6.495d-​e).

Love of truth is a virtue that cannot be learned because it is a gift of nature (an attribute of the soul) or second nature (a derivative of noble birth). This idea founds social predetermination, fixes every citizen of the city in a designated social position. The poor cannot escape their condition on their own, because they cannot realize their own situation. If they do leave it –​with the help of those who are enlightened –​they will lose their identity and begin to produce false imitations of real thoughts439.

438 C. D. C. Reeve, “Plato,” Political Thinkers from Socrates to the Present, eds. D. Boucher and P. Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003, p. 62. 439 J. Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris: Editions Flammarion 2007, p. V.

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On the other hand, Aristotle argues that it is only human who possesses speech and that it is precisely the possession of word that differentiates us from the world of animals. The latter can only communicate sensations of pleasure or pain, while we can distinguish between good and evil. If people are political beings, it is precisely because of speech, which can make the issues of justice and injustice common. Thus, the objectivity of good and evil separates from the relativity of satisfaction and pain, but the division of aisthesis is not obvious. What determines the boundary between the feeling of sadness and the experience of evil? The transition from one to the other happens only through the mediation of Logos (D 2). The point is to discover who has speech and who only has voice, thus what implicit structures include or exclude us from the political community. The poor –​those without civil rights –​share with animals the condition of speechlessness. It is no coincidence that the refusal to treat certain categories of people as political beings has always begun with the refusal to treat the sounds coming from their mouths as discourse. Politics as such is a battle for voice, for leaving the state of quasi-​animal immobility (PdL 12), it is questioning the opposition between phonè and logos (MT 41). All governance stems from the distribution of the right to speak: some utterances contribute to public discourse, other remain private voices; some share in universality, other are ascribed with particularity. Politics means a relentless struggle to repartition the division between the public and the private, namely to include in this space those excluded by the police logic –​slaves, workers, immigrants, the mad, the poor, women –​to disembody them from the “silent power” of birth and wealth. Politics deconstructs the “double vision” that disconnects political and economic affairs, polis and oikos; for instance, through the latter we may simultaneously declare universal equality and accept slavery treated in terms of family household or private property.440 Society remains a set of inegalitarian relations –​power of the elderly over the younger in families or the educated over the uneducated in schools –​while politics functions in this network of relations as an excess, setting in motion a mechanism of transgression, meaning it “extends the equality of public man to other domains” (HD 57). The vitality of the “platonic lie” in the last century resulted not only from the activity of “philosophical mandarins” but also from a whole series of less obvious theoretical reinforcements, such as the ethnographic concept of “culture” as the unconscious conformity of language, ritual, custom, and social position and

440 S.  Buck-​Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2009, pp. 27-​28.

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role. This approach assigns the body to a place and social position, condemning the individual to the involuntary reproduction of cultural inheritance, the reproduction of value systems and personal models. There is an anti-​ethnological dimension to this writing, which is recognized by commentators;441 some say that Rancière’s philosophy is a specific variety of cultural studies, which banishes categories of culture and identity.442 In any case, Rancière’s intellectual goal to imagine community outside of the network of determination and to describe history as a set of phenomena that break the pre-​established harmony among positions in hierarchy, ways of being, thinking, acting, and speaking. Let us consider a concrete example: the revolt of workers in a specific guild. Historians prefer sociological arguments that follow the model of historical reconstruction of the Annales school, also called the “Labrousse’s Moment:” the factors determining the outbreak of social discontent are always economic in nature, they determine social change, the dynamics of political movements, and the shape of ideologies. The structural cause of every revolution lies in the sphere of the distribution of the means of production.443 Therefore, the revolutionary uprising’s contingency is reduced to zero. Rancière reasons quite the opposite: “no economic crisis has ever led to revolution. A revolution is a matter of words, of demonstrating” (MOE).444 Next, he refers to the famous Shoemaker Strike in 1860. In France (as in England), the involvement of the representatives of this trade in various revolutionary movements has long garnered scholarly interest. Researchers wonder how to explain the high level of literacy and the already legendary hunger for books among poor cordonniers, whose work put them in no position to have contact with the written word as it was in the case of printers. Some suppose that this was due to the solitary way of working, which encouraged reflection and strengthened individualism. Meanwhile, others point to the high degree of socialization, which the shoemakers owed to ritual meetings in streets near workshops and to contact with clients.445 Rancière follows a different trope and links the shoemakers’ political activity with the symbolic 4 41 A. Farge, “L’Histoire comme avènement,” Critique 601–​602/​1997, pp.  461–​466. 442 K. Ross, “Rancière à contretemps,” in: La Philosophie déplacée, p. 198. 443 A.  Burguière, The Annales School: An Intellectual History, trans. J. M. Todd, Ithaca and London:  Cornell University Press 2009, chapter:  “The Labrousse Moment,” pp.  103–​130. 444 Rancière, La méthode de l’égalité, p. 58: “aucune crise économique n’a jamais amené la révolution. Une révolution est un processus de parole, de manifestation.” 445 E. J. Hobsbawm, J. W. Scott, “Des Cordonniers très politiques,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5/​2006, pp.  29–​50.

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order, in which this profession occupies an inferior place, one technologically primitive and connected with bodily lows (feet). This is evidenced by numerous texts, proverbs like the French “les cordonniers sont les plus mal chaussés,”446 social stereotypes, and their literary transformations. Thus, we abandon the mirage of source “shoemaker culture” and enter the arena of struggle for the name. The rebellious shoemakers did not accept the exclusion engendered by the word of the other. They rejected the stigmatizing name, which contained the essence of social predestination (NoH 97, ETP 84). What seems surprising is the convergence of historiography focused on units of longue durée units:  on sociology and Marxist discourses. The two unanimously point to economic determinants independent of the will of the dominated, maintaining that workers’ consciousness can develop only through external, theoretical stimulation. The popular counter-​discourse is part of the same logic, as it perceives the professional consciousness to be a natural outgrowth of workers’ culture or occupational tradition. The dominated cannot independently transgress the way of being imposed by domination, and if they do, they lose their identity and culture. This logic proclaims the impossibility of transgressing social boundaries and establishes the prohibition of dismantling the symbolic order.447 Meanwhile –​let us repeat once again –​the fighting workers were usually individuals separated from their social group. Their emancipation assumed the form of an aesthetic revolution: laboriously, in individual spiritual development, they established a distance from the universe of the sensible imposed by the “objective” condition. The social revolution remains the “daughter” of the aesthetic revolution (A 16), because it nullifies the involuntary subordination to the power of representation. Both revolutions can happen thanks to the subversive power of the new division of space and time, which denies the Platonic lie. It is no coincidence that the era of the liberation movements witnessed a boom in traveling and walking. As we read in a booklet about the former voyages “to the land of the people,” to travel means to “establish at each step, between the order of discourse and the order of facts, the immediate correspondence of the lines on the map and the undulations of the ground.”448 Wanderings, escapades, and peregrinations appear not only as topoi of poetry but become actively involved in the movement to democratize culture, which draws strength from the

4 46 The English equivalent reads “it’s always the baker’s children who have no bread.” 447 J. Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris 2007, p. III-​IV. 448 Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, p. 36.

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imperatives of discovery and newness.449 We may describe the transformation of the working animal into zoon politikon that constitutes the core of the plebeian experience –​as Martin Breaugh does –​as a transgression of the existing order, with the most salient features of this movement contained in the conscious displacement of an ancient concept, in the commonality, agoraphilia, and temporality of the gap (“temporalité de la brèche”).450 Partition, usurpation, and movement remain the essence of emancipation. Therefore, the most dangerous people for the established order were not those who complained about the predetermined quality of life limited by a rigid social hierarchy but the migrants between worlds who violated the division of space (everyone “in their place;” MOE) by crossing real territories and vast universes of the lacunar and incohesive word. What is equally important is the change in another factor of prohibition: time. The workers allow themselves to indulge in otium, this far niente that is the “delicious and necessary pursuit of a man who has devoted himself to idleness”451 praised by Rousseau in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It is not laziness but empty time, devoid of expectations, which subverts the hierarchy of activities. It is a highly suspected state of affairs, because it destroys the division of time, and is available to all, regardless of wealth, position, or education (A 46–​47). The school of thought of the revolted proletarians assumes that the worker can be a non-​worker, that he does not have to behave like a stereotypical representative of his class, but can entrust himself to the benefits of leisure, travel, philosophy, and the arts to constitute himself as a being who speaks and thinks according to his own laws. The fundamental experience of the proletarian is the scandal of stolen time. What is at stake in his struggle is not the “realization of exploitation” (they are aware of it) or the creation of worker solidarity (other workers remain allies of the authorities) but initiation into a new life. In this way, the proletarian realizes the dream of transgressing the worker’s condition. Rancière often refers to the notes of Louis-​Gabriel Gauny, who left behind no diary but a collection of letters, articles, poems, and meditations. Gauny writes from the position of a man equal to others, to the mighty of this world, the most powerful minds and geniuses of

449 D. F. Bell, “Writing, Movement/​Space, Democracy: On Jacques Rancière’s Literary History,” SubStance 33.1/​2004, pp. 130–​132. 450 M. Breaugh, L’expérience plébéienne. Une histoire discontinue de la liberté politique, Paris: Payot 2007, p. 23. 451 J. J. Rousseau, The Reveries of a Solitary Worker, trans. Ch. E. Butterworth, New York: Hackett Publishing 1992, p. 64.

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words, yet he is trapped in the infernal realm of prosaic life, eternal suffering, and the lack of time: “Childe Harold, Obermann, René, confess to us the fragrance of your agonies. Answer. Were you not happy in your glorious fits of melancholy? … Ah, Dante, you old devil, you never traveled to the real hell, the hell without poetry!” (NL 17). What remains most important is the initial gesture that reverses compelling logic: we are objectified not because we do not know it, but because we know it, and actually because we operate inside a modality of knowledge that presupposes inequality.452 To exit this modality, a new stage must be constructed, on which the encounter between the particular and the universal occurs. This is done not through identity declarations but the play of identities. One does not hear the angry voice of the “authentic” worker, but rather the polite, somewhat formalistic reasoning and a critique of all “identitarianism” (MOE). Forms of emancipation –​always ready to slide into identity logic –​are maintained in a state of perpetual unreadiness and lability as part of an aesthetic game. The latter does not have a magical egalitarian effect but is a promise or anticipation of equality.453 It is word that constructs the stage on which true emancipation occurs. Rancière strongly emphasizes the causal power of language, in which he comes close to Judith Butler’s view. Like Butler, Rancière states that –​contrary to Austin –​we cannot reconstruct the “overall situation” of a speech act while situation-​bound frames of utterance are characterized by instability and impermanence, as they are defined by the past (tradition, convention) and the unknown future (the subject does not control the effects of her utterance). Furthermore, we cannot separate the class of performatives because all language is performative in the sense that (as in Althusser) it interpellates the individual, bringing her into existence as a body-​linguistic entity. Butler writes that an utterance is “a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an iterability that exceeds the moment it occasions.”454 Likewise, Rancière believes that the verbal act connects different dimensions of temporality and leaves to the game all that is defined and fixated. However, there are texts that aim to destabilize the order of discourse. We call them “literature” or “poetry.”

452 “Choses (re)dites par J. Rancière,” in: Figures du “Maître ignorant:” savoir and émancipation, eds. M. Derycke, M. Peroni, Saint-​Etienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-​ Étienne 2010, p. 412. 453 Rancière, Louis-​Gabriel Gauny, p. 15. 454 J.  Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London and New York: Routledge 1997, p. 14.

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Plato excludes poets from the ideal state for a reason. The domain of poets’ activity is to reside in the field of lies: “all the poetic tribe … are imitators of images of excellence and of the other things that they ‘create,’ and do not lay hold on truth” (The Republic 10.600e). Thus, they unleash the power of appearance and expose the reasonably organized kallipolis to the danger of disidentification: the possibility of representing anything and being anyone. Plato’s condemnation is rooted in the fear of the anxiety that the word creates in the soul. The word has a depraving power because it contains various identifications in potentia. It must be used following proven patterns so that it does not arouse the passions and desires carried by the virtuality of meaning. Rancière traces the Platonic lie in its various manifestations, fascinated by loners who find the passion for poetry or metaphysics indispensable because thanks to it the real world becomes infected with appearance and transforms. Let us repeat that neither the accumulation of everyday experiences nor the awareness of market laws leads to transformation; it is not about day but about night, not about awareness of exploitation but the self-​awareness achievable only through stolen words, the self-​awareness situated in the gaps between the subject and its definition, between the definition and the image of collective imagination (NL 20–​21). Those who appreciate the power of stolen words simultaneously stand against the nihilistic wisdom that “there can be nothing but what is” and the mystification of an “authentic culture of the dregs of society.” Rancière makes those who appreciate stolen words his masters, because they show the way out of Plato’s trap: I am not talking exactly about scratching the images in the accustomed ways. I am not talking about the old political approach that unmasks the painful reality underneath the flattering surface. Nor am I talking about the modesty of the historian and the new-​look politics that invites us to look under the varnish of heroic paintings and see the circulating blood of a life that is simultaneously more savage and more tranquil. We are not going to scratch images to bring truth to the surface; we are going to shove them aside so that other figures may come together and decompose there (NL 10).

However, the Platonic lie continues to poison our minds. Rancière traces its persistence in various emancipatory discourses. First, of course, in the theory of the master Rancière betrayed, Althusser, in whose writings he finds the idea of unattainable self-​emancipation of the masses, which Rancière summarizes in an ironic paraphrase: “the masses can make history because the heroes make its theory” (AL 32). However, he also critiques other varieties of Marxist discourses that project a permanence of optical illusions and laboriously construct various forms of socialized Platonism, which replace “lack of time” with the necessities of the universe of production (PhP 131–​132). The Philosopher and His Poor brings a

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fiery accusation formulated on the principle of “argument from parataxis:”455 it juxtaposes various theories that construct figures of “the poor” (the dominated) and the philosopher as the provider of emancipatory tools. The theories that speak on behalf of those previously denied the opportunity to speak are to come from Marx, Sartre, Bourdieu. They all work in an explanatory paradigm and construct the Master figure. Marx wants to provide ideological certification to a group of revolutionaries and isolate them from the proletarian masses, who unreflectively draw their models from bourgeois culture. Sartre maintains that by virtue of the legitimacy he received from the party, he speaks “from within Marxism.”456 He also continues attacks on poets who “do not seek to present the truth.”457 On the other hand, Bourdieu constructs a theoretical justification for a system in which the task of the scientist is to provide the dominated with real reasons for their domination. Rancière’s polemic with Bourdieu is so important that I will devote a separate part to it below.

Parmenidean Marxism Rancière eagerly arranges a duel between philosophy and sociology. He contrasts the sovereignty of philosophical thought with the “wild philosophy” of social sciences (ETP 63) unable to invent own presuppositions and teleologies. From the beginning, sociology was a science committed to common good and betterment of the state, but it simultaneously developed its procedures in the shadow of a blackmail: to establish the rule of the wise people. Sociology has provided

455 Davis, Jacques Rancière, p. 20. 456 Devin Zane Shaw argues that contrary to his declarations, Rancière owed a debt to Sartre, the philosopher of political subjectification. In particular, this applies to Rancière’s conceptualization of freedom as “pure possibility” or “nothingness” (of equality). However, this parallel is being disarmed by the fundamental difference, namely Rancière’s emphasis on perfomativity: freedom does not need to be believed or disbelieved in  –​it must be constructed (MT 22). See D. Z. Shaw, Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Ranciêre, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2016, chapter two, “The Nothingness of Equality: Rancière’s ‘Sartrean Existentalism,’” pp.  51–​81. 457 Here is the relevant passage: “Poets are men who refuse to utilise language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instrument, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true.” J.-​P.  Sartre, What Is Literature and Other Essays, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1988, p. 29.

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the people with a theory of domination that reinforces the logic of domination by inscribing them in the figure of the child in need of care and guidance. Ultimately, sociology has transformed the concept of class struggle into a new social ontology. The principle of suspicion gave the social sciences their initial character, but with time, the dogmatism of hidden truth transformed into demystification routine. Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive anthropology is one of the most sophisticated varieties of this type of social thought. Bourdieu’s writings are animated by passion for unmasking that urges him to scrutinize philosophy, art, and many social practices perceived in terms of concealment. The source impulse for Bourdieu to tackle this challenge is the experience of cognitive scandal:  social injustice exists because of non-​recognition, meaning the overlap of objective (social) and subjective (mental) structures. These threads converge in a self-​reflexive examination of one’s own position, the place occupied in the field in which happens the work of thought. By means of a feedback loop, there is a constant circulation between three research fields and positions. The research fields are the false universalism of the dominating, the mute reality of the dominated, and sociology as “theology of the last instance.”458 The research positions are the modernized master of suspicion, the advocate of the disinherited, and the theorist of sociological denunciation. Bourdieu ascribes to systemic dislocation a revelatory function, thus an emancipatory one (I will scrutinize this causal reasoning later below). The point is, first, to expose the mechanisms of theoretical universalization. Scholastic reason marginalizes assumptions related to social position, which are part of the doxa inherent in the philosophical field, as well as those contained in the very fact of entering the game, namely the entrance of illusio. Second, we see the displacement of the economic and social conditions of access to universality and the fact that “cognitive interests are rooted in strategic or instrumental social interests … and that domination is never absent from social relations of communication.”459 The agonistic dynamics is obscured by meanings dynamics. Cognitive categories are produced within the framework of established order, which takes form through games played in many different social fields. Legitimate meanings become objects of struggle so as to convert into other forms of capital. Symbolic systems are not only tools of cognition but also control.

458 P.  Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. R. Nice, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000, p. 245. 459 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 65.

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Disclosure of this “common miscognition”460 is an interpretation that exhibits signs of intervention. The disinherited and subjected to symbolic violence ensure the durability of its mechanisms; they naturalize oppression and remain in the circle of commonsensical categories that preserve the status quo. They cannot understand domination mechanics on their own because it is masked by the culture of legitimacy instilled by social institutions: school, symbolic systems, taste disposition. Someone must do this work for them, and that someone obviously is the researcher, the intellectualist, the sociologist –​the only one who can see the ways out of the logic of practice, because he has the luxury of free time and the necessary tools for speculation. However, there lies a danger here: speculative thought tends to be abstract; contemporary critical theories suffer from a theoretical qua scholastic bias. The sociologist appears here as a self-​conscious philosopher and intellectualist, meaning the one who allows us to think the unthinkable. In this figure, we find features of a savior freeing the collective from the darkness of ignorance and bondage of appearance. In this way, Bourdieu is an emblematic case of the anti-​philosopher: he replaces the love of wisdom with its exposure and denunciation as a game of concepts and a real source of alienation. Bruno Latour sees in Bourdieu’s thought only a conceptual refreshment of the theory of alienation: people know not what they are doing and need a theorist (philosopher-​sociologist) to access their own experience.461 In fact, Bourdieu goes beyond the critique of ideology, arguing that the very concept of ideology belongs to idealist thought and as such remains in the realm of representation, while we must descend deeper, to the level of bodily dispositions and material practices. Indeed, we cannot understand subordination to the social order without analyzing the incorporation process, meaning the rooting of the social system in the body through habitus. It does not suffice to remain  –​like Althusser –​with the essentially abstract statement that the subjectification process is material, but this materiality must be subjected to systematic analysis. This nexus of issues determines the poetics of Bourdieu’s writings. While exploring the limitations of each discourse, Bourdieu constructs a compact and coherent system of concepts while combining speculative inquiries with various analytical techniques:  anthropological fieldwork, sociological empirical research, interviews, questionnaires, statistics, literary text analysis.

460 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 192. 461 B.  Latour, Libération, qtd. in Ch. Nordmann, Bourdieu/​Rancière, p. 11.

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In this feedback loop, the question of effect seems to assume the central position: Does the sociologist’s work in any way affect social praxis? The conceptual dynamics of reflexive anthropology are largely generated by the imperative to act and the associated anxiety. To reveal social laws –​or rather the nomos of specific social fields that constitutes the “rules of seeing and dividing” –​shows how they become rooted in the habitus and produce practices that fit the order, viewed and evaluated as appropriate,462 meaning to design social change. In the utopian dimension, the game is about conceiving social relations that are not based on domination. In the practical dimension, it is about the reflexive weakening of violence, according to the maxim that “the function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden. In so doing, it can help minimize the symbolic violence within social relations.”463 However, this answer dismisses the question of praxis, which in the writings of other philosophers –​such as Rancière, Badiou, and Balibar –​is one of the crystallizing axes of critical self-​knowledge. The imperative to act is accompanied by anxiety: after all, a sociologist’s work is itself a struggle for recognition. Bourdieu moves at the crossroads of fields (scientific, journalistic, political), as if he did not want to be subjected to a single system of value criteria, specific to a given field. At the same time, he constantly asks himself questions about the effectiveness of his actions. What seems symptomatic in this context is the shift in focus that occurred in the 1990s: Bourdieu left the scientific field and located most of his activity in the journalistic and political fields. The turning point is considered to be the normative text included in the postscript to Rules of Art from 1991, “Toward a Corporatization of the Universal,” which introduces a “programme for the collective action of intellectuals.”464 We find there the postulate of defending the autonomy of the intellectual field and the field of cultural production, whose anarchic order always challenges the laws of economics and common sense. Indeed, the field’s autonomy ensures the continuity of work on the production of the material and intellectual tools of Reason. At the time of publication of this book, Bourdieu is already preparing The Weight of the World (La Misère du monde; 1993) with a powerful collection of interviews bearing witness to social misery. In this case, the interview constitutes a form of recording of the individual condition, while sociological commentary

462 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp.  204–​205. 463 P.  Bourdieu, On Television, trans. P. Parkhurst Ferguson, New York: The New Press 1998, p. 17. 464 P.  Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genezis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. S. Emanuel, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995, p. 339.

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is a form of its objectification. As the editor of the collection, Bourdieu moves from being a sociologist of domination to the sociologist of the dominated. Since 1995, Bourdieu was actively supporting public transport workers who reacted with a mass strike to the plan prepared to reduce the social security system. He attempts to create a platform of scientists autonomous from the media and political parties, who would expose the ideology of false universalism, which proclaims that everyone has mastered the tools for political and cultural production and for understanding politics and own business. After 1998, as a remarkably active publicist, Bourdieu expands his accusation against the “neoliberal blight.”465 His latest Les Structures sociales de l’économie (2000) and Propos sur le champ politique (2000) are a theoretical extension of his activities in the political field and an attempt at a scientific critique of neoliberal economism. Some see Bourdieu’s late engagement as a “passage à l’acte:” here is an intellectual who recognizes the aporias of the system he constructed and throws himself into compulsive actions, and then he tries to theorize them to maintain his position in an autonomous intellectual field. However, one could put it somewhat more dialectically: at the beginning of the 1990s, Bourdieu noticed the disproportion between the analysis of the mechanisms of domination and the empirical research on the condition of the dominated, and so he decided to make up for the latter. However, disinheritance is a derivative of systemic violence that also demands elaboration. For an analysis of domination based on symbolic violence to be effective, it needs to have adequate publicity. The Weight of the World became a bestseller, which allows us to believe in the effectiveness of political action based on scientific authority; albeit one still negotiated in a field whose autonomy calls for defense. Engagement requires activity in the field of journalism, but to protect the political potential of the engaged intellectualist, the laws governing the media world must be analyzed and neutralized, which is a diversion that Bourdieu deliberately implemented on enemy territory (see his televised lectures On Television from 1996). Bourdieu’s sociology founds a vision of the world that is structured by relations of subordination, and roles in the system are distributed according to social predetermination. However, he also draws an emancipatory horizon: we may weaken the mechanisms of domination by revealing them, we may escape the world of necessity by acquiring critical self-​knowledge. This process must be mediated by the intellectualist/​academic, but engagement in a field other than

465 See P. Mounier, ”Le Sociologue dans la cité,” in: Pierre Bourdieu, une introduction, Paris 2001.

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the scientific one requires constant reinforcement of one’s position in the scientific field. Before presenting critical analyses of this reflexive anthropology, I will briefly summarize its mechanics. In terms of social relations, this sociology is seemingly reminiscent of interactionist approaches. It defines social functions as social fictions. It describes the subjects cast in these functions as personae enacted through institutional rites. These rites shape the social image of the individual as well as constitute the individual herself, forcing her to fulfill a function.466 The struggle in the game is preceded by a consent to illusio, meaning the stakes of the field, the rules, and the specific criteria of evaluation. As a condition of its own continuity, the game (re) produces all the “unthought presuppositions” and generates “the almost miraculous encounter between the habitus and a field, between incorporated history and an objectified history.”467 The game involves the negotiation of capital, its transaction, and conversion. Of the various types of capital (economic, social, cultural, legal, field-​specific capitals), cultural and symbolic capital remain the most important ones. Cultural capital is expressed primarily in the linguistic and cultural competencies of the individual. It appears in three basic forms: embodied (long-​term dispositions of body and mind: good manners, taste, knowledge of the forms of high culture, cultural and social conventions), institutionalized (formalized education) and objectified (possessed cultural goods). It is one of the most common (invisible) obstacles to social advancement. Symbolic capital is the product of the transformation of a power relationship into a meaning relationship. As such, it gives the possibility of exercising symbolic power (with the use of symbolic violence). Its oblivion as capital funds legitimate power. Bourdieu refers to the position of the game as the social field; the name appeared in the 1970s as a concretization of the vague term “objective structures.” Field refers to a section of the social structure that brings together individuals and groups focused on similar aspirations and competing for position according to valid criteria. Each field has defined stakes (the goal of the game), rules (illusio), and nomos, meaning the law: this is the “thesis’ which, because it is never put forward as such, cannot be contradicted, has no antithesis. As a legitimate principle of division defining the thinkable and the unthinkable.”468

466 P.  Bourdieu, Leçon sur la leçon, Paris: Editions de Minuit 1982, p. 50. 467 P.  Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Stanford University Press 1990, pp.  66–​67. 468 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 97.

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One can describe the field with the scalar concept of autonomy or freedom from external constraints. There are relatively autonomous fields (science, literature) and heteronomous fields (politics, journalism). Modernity is the domain of certain fields’ autonomization:  the intellectual field frees itself from the influence of economics, the artistic field –​from the influence of bourgeois morality; both are characterized by building a distance from the political field. Moreover, modernity is the domain of the growth of non-​autonomous fields such as the “media reign,” which forces players from other fields to adopt allogeneic patterns and rules. Interdependencies between fields determine the dynamics of the social agon. Reflexive sociology differs distinctly from symbolic interactionism in that it looks beyond the awareness context. Actors in the social field cannot be seen as rational, goal-​oriented individuals. Bourdieu accuses all those who develop theories of the rational actor (Goffman, Sartre) of miscalculation, which stems from the position they hold: the conviction that everyone shapes their destiny and acts according to their interests is the illusion of the ruling classes. The behavior of individuals must be historicized, meaning we must pay attention to its self-​replicating aspect: the most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity”.469 We recognize here an adaptation mechanism at work:  aspirations are reconciled with the possibilities of their realization based on the choice of the necessary (la choix du nécessaire). However, this is not a rational calculation but the influence of habitus. Habitus is the “embodied history that has become nature and thus forgotten,” the result of the subjectification of objectivity that expresses itself objectively; and it is the socially established nature.470 The social becomes internalized in the individual and becomes a permanent disposition. Through the incorporation of external necessity, first, the world appears to us in categories of the obvious, and second, the social structure is reproduced along with its class stratification. The notion of habitus allows us to go beyond the dualistic vision in which what counts is only the act of consciousness transparent to itself or the thing defined by externality; habitus establishes a logic of action that actualizes objectification in bodies and objectification in institutions. The important point here is that habitus is a socially produced system of dispositions acquired through practices and

469 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 54. 470 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 56.

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directed toward practice.471 As Geoffroy Mannet notes, the “police governance” in Bourdieu’s theory is different from Plato’s police to the extent that it turns away from the heaven of ideas to inscribe pre-​established law in the body like a permanent tattoo. The rest of Plato’s shepherding legacy remains the same.472 Bourdieu argues that the body functions as a principle of individualization and collectivization at the same time: it undergoes a process of socialization that produces individuation.473 Cultural arbitrariness penetrates the physical hexis; each technique of the body is the pars pro toto of the system of which it is a part, enabling the persistence of the values that have become flesh. This is the “embodied political mythology” that has become a disposition, an enduring way of adopting speaking, walking, and thinking. The permanence of social devices is ensured precisely by this self-​affirming logic, which reinforces the belief in the legitimacy of the system, in its rootedness in reality (rooted in reality only because it contributes to its production). It is extremely difficult to keep a critical distance from the original doxa because “what is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.”474 Distance to necessity is characteristic of the bourgeois experience of the world. It represents the possibility of transcending the logic of practice and gaining access to the world of thought, which neutralizes necessity. Critical self-​knowledge cannot be acquired by the dominated because they do not have scholastic dispositions. They are involved in actions dictated by the practical sense, which functions as a blindness: its directives become no object of reflection. Furthermore, their approach to language prevents the dominated from gaining a symbolic mastery of their experience. Linguistic relations coincide with relations of symbolic capital and domination fields. Each utterance is an act of power that inscribes itself in existing social inequalities and in relations of domination. The illusion of a linguistic community that has taken hold of linguistics must be dispelled because language is available unequally, following the lines of symbolic capital distribution. Therefore, “if a French person talks with an Algerian, or a

471 P. Bourdieu, L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992, pp. 76; 107. See P. Bourdieu, Questions de sociologue, Paris: Editions de Minuit 1980, p. 29. 472 G.  Mannet, L’Impureté politique. La sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu au miroir de la pensée politique de Jacques Rancière, Paris: L’Harmattan 2013, pp. 81–​87. 473 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 191. 474 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 73.

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black American to a WASP, it is not two persons who speak to each other but, through them, the colonial history in its entirety, or the whole history of the economic, political, and cultural subjugation of blacks (or women, workers, minorities, etc.).”475 The language available to the dominated is concrete (non-​abstract) and locked in particularity and subjectivity. This language connects individual cases and blocks access to universality, preventing the revealing of the conditions of domination. The dominated hold no legitimate word –​the only one with the power to create and mobilize –​so they are condemned to political representations that may always turn out to be usurpations. Their speech remains a cry, a complaint, an expression of pain. In the postscript to The Weight of the World, Bourdieu directly compares their voice to the patient’s weak and uncertain complaint, which demands the interpretation of an expert.476 Moreover, language is also a tool for a soft form of violence called symbolic violence. It is based on the reinforcement of dominance through symbolic actions that naturalize subordination. The idea is for the dominated to perceive reality –​including relationships of domination –​as natural or even beneficial for themselves. Symbolic violence exploits the natural tendency to incorporate external constraints and accept pre-​reflective assumptions, this “doxic acceptance of the world, due to the immediate agreement of objective structures and cognitive structures.”477 Thus, symbolic violence transforms itself into “nature” or “the order of things,” becoming the most perfect form of dominion: the terror of self-​obviousness. A paradigmatic example of symbolic violence is androcentrism, which operates as a “natural worldview.” Male domination structures reproduce beyond the control of consciousness, on the level of schemata inscribed in the gendered habitus. The power of male domination comes from the combination of two processes: “it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction.”478 Therefore, domination reproduces at the level of conaissance par corps, meaning the level of practical, bodily, and non-​distanced cognition. The relations of symbolic domination are somatic, embodied through socialization, settled in the shadows of the habitus

475 Bourdieu, Wacquant, An Invitation, p. 144. 476 P. Bourdieu et al., La Misère du monde, Paris: Seuil 1993, pp. 1451–​1452. See Propos sur le champ politique, p. 84. 477 Bourdieu, Wacquant, An Invitation, p. 168. 478 P.  Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. R. Nice, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001, p. 23.

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under the guise of permanent dispositions. Men and women are endowed with various socially constructed traits (love for power games/​passivity and subordination) and modalities of being (gazing/​being gazed at), which take the form of a permanent, unsubvertible gender order. Thus, genre is not a role to be played but a bodily representation of the social universe. We learn about Bourdieu’s device from his juxtaposition of the interactionist and with the rational actor theories makes clear: he moves domination to a lower level, to the domain of the unconscious, which means in this case only ignorance and unrecognition. Incorporated social structures last by virtue of their invisibility in the shadows of the habitus, where they identify with the natural order of things and require no discursive legitimization. This is where the mission of the sociologist begins. Because the mechanisms of symbolic violence owe their effectiveness to collective ignorance, we need a thought that will recognize the unrecognition. Because custom or the historical arbitrariness of institutions becomes the mythical reason, we need someone to perform a demythologizing gesture and reveal this reason as pure arbitrariness. That someone must be a sociologist, presented in a double opposition to both the philosopher and the journalist. The journalistic field is non-​autonomous, governed by the unspecific laws of popularity/​viewership (the pressure of the economic field), time pressure, and competition (enforced by the liberal market). Sociology opposes this domain of catchy slogans and ready-​made cliches repeated by full-​time fast-​thinkers as a rigorous science based on empirical research. On the other hand, there is philosophy, the domain of abstract thought, which the sociologist opposes with the second-​degree reflexivity: the knowledge of the social conditions of practicing critical thought. It is the sociologist who introduces us into the universe of presuppositions, into the category of unthought thoughts that determine all thinking. She assumes the duty of telling truth about the battles in which truth is at stake.479 Under the gaze of the uninvolved researcher –​uninvested in the game –​ illusio reveals itself as delusion and bad faith.480 The sociologist becomes the person between the observer, the reformer, and the physician-​therapist. The assumption responsible for linking interpretation to intervention assumes a form like the talking cure. Bourdieu formulates an equation that he never attempts to verify: to become aware of determinations is to become free of them. For example, in his lectures on television, Bourdieu argues that the sociologist’s work can “increase awareness of the existence of certain mechanisms, and

479 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 9–​10, 16. 480 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 48.

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thus contribute to at least a slight expansion of the freedom of people who are manipulated by these mechanisms.” Specifically, in the journalistic field, it could look like this: the revealing and explaining of the mechanisms of competition could lead to an agreement whose goal is to neutralize this competition: “All of this is utopian, and I know it. But to those who always tax the sociologist with determinism and pessimism, I will only say that if people became aware of them, conscious action aimed at controlling the structural mechanisms that engender moral failure would be possible.”481 This statement seems to be full of Enlightenment pathos but its modality (“if...”) simultaneously calls good news into question. What is the purpose of the clash between the utopian dream of the kingdom of Reason and the brutal reality in which domination insidiously reproduces itself in us, like a parasite? It serves no other purpose than to dramatize the work of the sociologist, in which emancipatory pathos clashes again and again with sober realism, the bitter knowledge about the world subjected to the arbitrary reign of rationalized power.482 This model of reflexive anthropology became typically attacked from two sides:  methodological and practical ones. On the one hand, scholars accused the model of no scientific integrity and “sociological terrorism;”483 on the other hand, they indicated that sociological denunciation supports the involuntarily infinite reproduction of domination. Let us begin with arguments of the first type. According to Jean-​Claude Passeron, Bourdieu formulates a tautology:  it is impossible to escape the state of disinheritance, because the affected ones are disinherited. This is the result of absolutizing concepts. For example, la dépossession, usually translated as “disinheritance,” is a purely negative term that reduces its object to a lack, introducing a miserable description of popular practices. On top of that, it is a monolithic term that neglects the stratification of lower classes and the diversity of their practices.484 Charlotte Nordmann similarly links the charges of monolithism and false universalization: “similarly to disinheritance, there is in principle only one domination, always identical with itself, just as the exaggerated image of 481 Bourdieu, On Television, pp. 55–​56. In Leçon sur la leçon, p. 21, Bourdieu writes: “Knowledge has an effect that seems liberating to me every time... it touches the foundations of symbolic violence.” Fr. “La connaissance exerce par soi un effet –​qui me paraît libérateur … toutes les fois qu’elle touche aux fondements de la violence symbolique.” 482 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 120. 483 See  J.  Verdès-​Leroux, Le Savant et la politique. Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu, Paris 1998. 484 J.-​C.  Passeron, Le Raisonnement sociologique, Paris: Nathan Université 1991, p. 253 ff.

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Kabyle society can pretend to be an adequate model of male domination as such.”485 Bourdieu is to always detect general laws and deliberately shuns empirical details that introduce ambiguity. Thus, Nordmann argues that his analyses call for more nuance. Others, like Bernard Lahire, note that Bourdieu provides no empirical analysis of the habitus’ operation at the individual level, namely language acquisition, learning, and the incorporation of social norms. This proves the detachment of conceptual work from sociological research. The list of fields studied by Bourdieu –​politics, journalism, literature, theatre, philosophy, academia –​shows that he systemically ignores lower social universes,486 favoring the sociology of culture production over that of reception; in the latter, the recipient is reduced to the competence necessary to decipher the message, there is no question of her being a producer of the message’s meaning. Yet others, like Jean-​ Claude Kaufmann, accuse Bourdieu of transferring concepts developed from anthropological studies on the Kabyle people to the more complex reality of modern democracies, in which we deal with changeability and impermanence of dispositional systems, in which actors operate at the junction of different fields, governed by different laws.487 We may also roughly accept Bourdieu’s diagnoses while pointing to their anachronism. As Bourdieu argues from L’Amour de l’art to Distinction, perhaps artworks once fortified interclass divisions, but today elites are characterized by cultural omnivorousness. Zygmunt Bauman argues with Bourdieu that, in the 1960s, a certain dogma of civilization was bleeding out: “culture” was no longer a horticultural concept that supported colonizing missions and reinforced the division between the enlightened and the ignorant. With the transition of modernity from the solid to the fluid stage, we enter a space of self-​fashioning freedom. However, the weakness of this critique seems directly proportional to the risk of an epochal diagnosis. Those who storm the fortress of reflexive anthropology from another side indicate its non-​functionality and hidden fatalism. The dominated are to define themselves only by their subjection to domination, while the possibilities of counteracting domination appear as theoretically impossible. Politics is reduced

485 Ch.  Nordmann, Bourdieu/​Rancière, p. 114. Fr. “Comme la dépossession, la domination est fondamentalement “une”, toujours identique à elle-​même, de sorte que limage “grossie” de la société kabyle peut prétendre représenter adéquatement la domination masculine en général.” 486 B.  Lahire, Le Travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu: dettes et critiques, Paris 2001. 487 J.-​C.  Kaufmann, Ego. Pour une sociologie de l’individu, Paris: Nathan 2001.

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to the struggle of interests in the political field, while all social relations  –​to relations of power. What becomes forgotten is the multidimensionality of democratic societies, in which horizontal ties and relationships play an equally important role.488 Intellectuals associated with Mouvement Anti-​utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (MAUSS) try to undermine Bourdieu’s theoretical edifice in yet another way, namely by criticizing economism, instrumental rationalism, the theory of interest, and individualism in the social sciences and philosophy, while promoting Maussian gift economics, whose specific rationality is based on building social bonds. From this perspective, we see that Bourdieu unjustifiably extends strictly economic relations to all social relations.489 Rancière seems to appreciate the movement’s anti-​economism, but he rightly notes that Maussian thought founds not the universality of forms of symbolic exchange but the universality of the ethics of generosity (SP 360). Rancière attempts –​with good results –​to detach the critique of sociology from any anthropological hypotheses himself. Before briefly discussing the basic parameters of this acrimonious polemic –​spread over many writings and culminating in The Philosopher and His Poor –​I would like to draw attention to its one-​sidedness. The only meeting between Rancière and Bourdieu happened at the Sorbonne during a conference on the publication of L’Histoire des femmes, at which both were speakers. Bourdieu reportedly warned the audience not to think he is saying anything like what the previous speaker just said. Their clash in the French intellectual field in the last two decades of the twentieth century was itself illustrative of the relationships of domination. As the head of his own research center and editor-​in-​chief of a scholarly journal and publishing series, Bourdieu situated himself in a dominating position and brushed Rancière’s critique aside with perfect silence, even though it was perhaps the most striking attack on his approach of its kind. Why did Bourdieu not respond to the charges? I believe that he included Rancière’s arguments in a certain generalized polemical type, justifying them with “philosophers’ blindness to their own scholastic blindness.”490 Rancière’s comprehensive and frontal critique of Bourdieu’s sociology centers around several issues. The first is economic and social hyperdetermination. Bourdieu incorrectly assumes that there is homology between individual and class habiti, or to use his vocabulary, that the irreducible particularity of

488 J.  Alexander, La Réduction. Critique de Bourdieu, Paris: Cerf 2000. 489 A.  Caillé, Don, intérêt et désintéressement: Bourdieu, Mauss, Platon et quelques autres, Paris: La Découverte 2005. 490 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 29.

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individual habiti reveals –​at a deeper level of analysis –​a homogeneity determined by social position.491 This homology ultimately reinforces the power of necessity, which cannot be reduced by any action. As we know, for Rancière, the basic figure of emancipation is the subject who transcends social predetermination by borrowing symbolic forms from the dominant sphere. Thus, the subject ignores her supposed ignorance, emerges from the state of inability, and her emancipatory gesture includes critique of domination, although the gesture is neither the critique’s point of departure nor arrival.492 Meanwhile, Bourdieu argues that the dominated are deprived of access to the legitimate word, that their speech –​even in the case of political activists, reformers, and revolutionaries –​remains a set of ready-​made formulas and concrete references to direct experience in all its singularity. Thus, he deepens the gap between the “people of necessity” and the “people of entertainment;” and this juxtaposition –​despite claims of breaking the commonality of domination and non-​domination –​brings to mind discourses that justify the exclusion of women or workers from political life.493 In essence, as Peter Sloterdijk puts it, habitus is a “somatized class consciousness” that resembles a never-​fading dialect, it is “the base dimension into the psychophysical structures of the individual” that excludes individual projects-​of-​Self.494 The above is linked to the elevation of the sociologist as the modern wise person. The second critical strike by Rancière in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres aims at the subversive promotion of epistemocracy, the legitimization of the rule of the most enlightened. Linked to a vision of social predetermination, this idea reveals its aristocratic character. This is best seen in The Weight of the World in

491 492 493 494

Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 73. Mannet, L’Impureté politique, pp.  142–​143. Nordmann, Bourdieu/​Rancière, p. 95. P.  Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, trans. W. Hoban, Cambridge: Polity 2013, pp. 180–​181. Sloterdijk’s argumentation that goes back to biography and the need to justify one’s own social advancement seems less convincing: “When Bourdieu … the grandson of a poor métayer and the son of a postman from Beam, rose to become a master thinker and dominate the ‘field’ of academic sociology in France, the thought of the ineradicable habitus of his class helped him to allay the suspicion that he had betrayed his origins through his career. From this perspective, the theory of habitus has the inestimable advantage of serving the moral reassurance of its author: even if I wanted to betray my own class, it would be impossible, because its absorption into my old Adam forms the basis of my social being.” Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, p. 181.

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which  –​despite good intentions  –​the most important message resides in the doubling of the word into the voice of the poor and sociological commentary, into the helpless expression of suffering and the opinion of a savant, into disease and diagnosis. Non-​semantic signals and signs constitute the inarticulate complaint of the patient, which call for an explanation in social and economic terms.495 As the afterword to The Weight of the World explicitly explains, science plays the role of the physician who reveals the social source of misery (collectively obscured) in all its forms, thus seeking to eradicate the misery. Therefore, science blocks the potentiality of politics, for the political subject is not a suffering one but an invention that “has no self ” (n’a pas de soi; ROM 87). The anonymous suffering of the other managed by the sociologist is the scrutinized other that legitimizes the whole endeavor. The position of the wise person, which the sociologist reserves for themselves, simultaneously requires the constant exposure of the ignorance of the quasi-​wise people and proving of the impotence of the poor.496 At the same time, the position predestines to the role of an advisor who indicates the most appropriate solutions to people in power. The philosopher does embark here at all on an “anti-​sociological crusade,” as Alberto Toscano would like it to be. The philosopher does not refuse to think about the social conditions of politics and does not gravitate at all toward the play of invariantive and transcendental conceptual structures.497 She does not accept the vision of a social order marked by necessity and a situation in which sociology explains to philosophy the deep meaning of its reflection. Social science still fits the classical figure of “[t]his scientific project presents a classic figure: the young science wresting from the old metaphysical empire one or another of its provinces in order to make it the domain of a rigorous practice armed with the instruments and methods suitable for transforming the impotent dream of speculation into positive knowledge” (PhP 167). However, it is precisely philosophy that should highlight the unthought of the critical method. After all, sociology remains a science provided it imputes ignorance to the studied subjects, like dogmatic or scientific Marxism does when it valorizes the people or the proletariat only to enclose them in the logic of external truth, whose depositary is the elite of philosophers and professional revolutionaries or the party. Besides,

495 Bordieu, La Misère du monde, pp.  1451–​1453. 496 See a detailed analysis of the sociological method used in this work: M. Peroni, “Le Sociologue explicateur à l’article de la compréhension. À propos de “La Misère du monde,” in: Figures du “Maître ignorant,” pp.  245–​272. 497 A. Toscano, “Anti-​Sociology and Its Limits,” in: Reading Rancière, pp.  221–​232.

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according to a risky hypothesis by Rancière, the social sciences were founded “against democracy,” meaning they stem from the conviction that the social body is torn apart, and the social bond requires a rethink and re-​establishing. At the core of sociology, we find the anxiety of a community of atoms no longer bound by the tradition of the living word but only by the impermanent bonds established by the dead letter of writing (ETP 91). Thus, against the new dogmatism of the social sciences, the task of philosophy would be to reconsider a different kind of community than the one that presupposes the suppression of democratic entropy and the proliferation of meanings. In this context, Philippe Corcuff asks whether emancipation does not presuppose at least a minimal reference to domination, as by its nature it is a liberation from domination? In his view, Rancière is a philosophical populist who refuses to decipher the compulsions that weigh on the dominated, and their impact on the numerous emancipatory practices.498 Unsurprisingly, it is a sociologist who endeavors this decryption. But can one sustain this accusation and see Rancière as an idealistic philosopher who does not understand the empirical sociologist? It would require a fair amount of ill will. Rancière meticulously documents the history of workers’ revolts and histories of individual emancipation as testified by his books The Nights of Labor and Staging the People, to mention two of many. However, Rancière discovers a different logic of liberation than the one based on recognition. He discovers and describes the mechanisms of disidentification through an impossible identification with the other, through heterology. The possibility of politics and sovereignty emerges where the logic of the other and the gap between words and bodies is maintained. Thus, the actual emancipation occurs in a space ignored by the sociologist: in “suspension between two incarnations;”499 namely that which fits into the police logic of the status quo and that which lies in the domain of identity play and aesthetic appearance. Bourdieu treats art in terms of camouflage:  the veil of the taste judgment’s unselfishness conceals rigorous mechanisms of social distinction. Rancière refuses to reduce aesthetic difference to the sublimation or concealment of social difference (FPA 15), so he vehemently attacks this reductionism.500 Instead

498 Ph.  Corcuff, Où est passé la critique sociale? Penser le global au croisement des savoirs, Paris: Galilée 2012, p. 41; C. Grignon, J.-​C. Passeron, Le Savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature, Paris 1989. 499 Aspe, Partage de la nuit, p. 18. Fr. “Un suspens entre deux incarnations.” 500 This is the third area in which Bourdieu and Rancière clash. I discuss it in more detail in the chapter “Glory to Thieves!”

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of mechanistically reproducing, Rancière proposes a vision of speaking bodies captured by words that extract them from their positions and destroy the existing order. He focuses on the regime of écriture and literature as the other of social knowledge. Indeed, it is literature that moves distributions of the sensible, subjects its rules to negotiation, and disrupts the “naturalness” of the existing order. Literature is linked to the disorder of speaking beings and to the scandal of politics. Finally, fourth, a serious objection against Bourdieu focuses on the lack of theoretical elaboration of politics. Bourdieu understands politics as a struggle for the power to impose a legitimate vision of the social world. This way Bourdieu misses the point: he ignores politics altogether and reduces it to police. Let us repeat, there is a common sphere of the sensible distributed by arbitrary divisions. Individuals do not perceive the divisions, because the latter are masked by a phantasmal unity, a consensual form that goes by different names, and today its elementary name is “economics.” For politics to exist, the community must be divided anew, along different lines. Thus, politics cuts across the partitions that define the interior and exterior of three identity forms: the consensual national or supranational community, the identities of social interest groups, and individual identities, meaning all subjects of sociological scrutiny. This is not a proposal for an alternative political anthropology, like the one by Marcel Gauchet,501 but a diagnosis and a postulate. The diagnosis concerns actual mechanisms of emancipation through de-​identification, while the postulate –​subordinating discourse mechanics to new pragmatics of action. Summarizing Rancière’s charges against Bourdieu’s sociology, Olivier Davis writes that it “is unduly suspicious, scientistic, self-​aggrandizing, reductive, deterministic, and practically (politically) ineffectual.”502 Sociologist the king 501 S. Vibert, “La Quête de l’autonomie collective. Retour sur les fondements de la démocratie avec Gauchet, Castoriadis et Rancière,” in: Démocratie et modernité, p. 91. 502 Davis, Jacques Rancière, p. 23: “It is suspicious and scientistic because it assumes, as Althusser did, that social mechanisms are hidden and accessible only to scientific analysis by sociologists and that surface manifestations are unreliable; it is institutionally self-​aggrandizing because only sociologists are thought capable of such analysis, as opposed, in particular, to philosophers; it is reductive because it suppresses mixity of, and exchange between, high and low cultures and between oppressed and oppressors, bringing about “the suppression of intermediaries, of points of meeting and exchange between the people of reproduction and the elite of distinction;” it is deterministic because it assumes that social milieu determines taste, thought, feeling and potential and thus, surprisingly given its progressive reputation, it renews Plato’s autocratic and hereditary model of a society in which, by and large, individuals stay put in the

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proclaims they are demystifying the cunning of domination, while in fact closing the circle of impossibility and prohibition; they endlessly refute freedom and equality, reinforcing arbitrariness by rooting it in necessity. This seemingly progressive thought repeats the gesture of violence already inscribed in the Platonic vision:  everyone is assigned to a certain position, and the wise people receive instruments of power. The Marxist vision of ideology stems from the assumption that the dominated and the exploited suffer from the lack of knowledge, that they are unaware of their position in this system. Moreover, ignorance is a function of their position in the system: they are dominated because they lack awareness, and they are unaware because they are dominated. Of course, after this recognition comes the project of dialectical liberation. Bourdieu engages with the idea while supplementing it with “Parmenidean necessity.” It doubles Marxist necessity with the necessity of its eternal existence. In doing so, Bourdieu combines two prohibitions. First, “everyone remains in their position,” second, “forget not the class struggle.” The result of this crossover is Parmenidean Marxism. Here the bourgeois world reveals to us its disenchanted banality, the secret that no one sees: class struggle is the eternal truth and destiny of societies (PhP 179). Bourdieu wants to bring to light any “goes-​without-​saying” of an era, any unthought de iure and de facto, to emancipate these through enlightening. However, Rancière tears apart the logical bond of this reasoning’s foundation:  enlightenment is always by definition a reinforcement of the division between the people –​dedicated to the maintenance and reproduction of life –​and the dominant classes, dedicated to the contestation of the fields of power, economics, and culture. Bourdieu denounces domination and doubles this domination by demonstrating the lack of an alternative to the existing order. He remains a worthy representative of science whose entire prowess has been invested in the endless work of mourning the democratic and socialist hopes of Durkheim’s sociology (SP 363–​364). His discourse proves perfectly useless: useless to the dominated. It cannot serve to reverse disinheritance as its only message is: you must resign yourself to fate, because the only freedom available to us is the internalization of necessitas in the form of amor fati. Moreover, we may interpret Rancière’s philosophy as an attempt to transcend the horizon outlined by Bourdieu’s reflexive anthropology from yet another

places into which they have been born. Finally, it is practically (politically) ineffective because it is “depressing,” a diagnosis of social injustice which sees this as so powerful and all-​encompassing as to be beyond the redress for which the analysis ostensibly calls. It cannot inspire change.”

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perspective. We may easily notice that as time passes, the pre-​discursive, affective, and somatic dimension play an increasingly important role in Rancière’s writings.503 However, unlike for Bourdieu, Rancière does not locate in this dimension the deepest conditions inaccessible to consciousness and will. Instead, Rancière remains a thinker of emancipation understood as a concrete and situated practice that can be conceptualized, as Davide Panagia does, as “relational form that disposes and arranges bodies and creates frictions and fluidities for the transformation of existing arrangements.”504 This “sentimental mode of reading” allows us to reconstruct the deep logic of this decentered  –​because emancipation-​oriented –​ philosophy: 1. Everything and anything has the power of sensorial appearance. 2. The disposition or style or arrangement of things is of primary political importance. 3. Given 2, politics is aesthetic. 4. The site of political and aesthetic attention is the dividing line that relates persons, things, and events. 5. Meaning, explanation, intelligibility, and understanding are not the exclusive determinants of critical thinking in the social sciences and humanities. 6. Given 5, nonpurposiveness (or disinterest) is a real dimension of experience.505

In the Belly of the Beast Contemporary philosophy also encloses us in a circle of impotence. Rancière eagerly explores the mechanics and pragmatics of its discourses in successive attempts at describing its poetics. His dual thesis holds that dominant techniques of critical thought in contemporary philosophy generate interesting interpretations, but they utterly reverse their orientation. Previously, philosophies of suspicion, namely the symptomatologies exposing the truth hidden beneath the surface of appearances, were oriented toward emancipatory goals. Meanwhile, the contemporary ones transformed into a witch-​hunt of critical thought. At the same time –​the second part of the thesis expounds –​even if a theory of possible emancipation appears, it is disarmed by the very mechanics of suspicion.

503 J.-​Ph. Derranty, K. Genel, “La Théorie critique, entre reconnaissance et mésentente,” in: ROM  42–​43. 504 Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments, p. 3 505 Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments, p. 17.

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First comes the thesis of voluntary surrender. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière reinforces the idea with a typical parataxis argument: from Debord to Sloterdijk, contemporary thought has lost its characteristic slant toward practice. The Marxism denunciating commodity mythologies once served to unravel the mechanisms of domination and forge weapons against them, but today, in its fasting form, Marxism means a disillusioned awareness of the reign of the market and the spectacle. Post-​Marxist and post-​situationist wisdom boil down to a vision of humanity subject to compulsive desire and frenetic consumption. The same applies to critical theory:  the mechanism of reversal keeps turning reality into illusion or illusion into reality, poverty into wealth or wealth into poverty, but the work of concepts serves critical theory only to amplify the paradoxes. A specific leftist melancholy has been born, and it makes us believe that all our subversive desires are subject to the laws of economics, which we are always merely entering new games in the global market of experiments with individual and collective life. That we are in the belly of a monster, and our gestures of resistance are absorbed by the beast, giving it new strength (ES 32–​34). Melancholic leftism feeds on a double accusation: of the power of the beast and of those who believe they are combatting the beast but in truth only serve it. This culminates in perverse defenses of capitalism, which is to have lost its esprit and must be saved (Bernard Stiegler),506 or in apologies of liquid modernity (Zygmunt Bauman). The melancholy of this thought stems from its fixation on the lost object and exaltation with own impotence: “Melancholy feeds on its own impotence. It is enough for it to be able to convert it into a generalized impotence and reserve for itself the position of the lucid mind casting a disenchanted eye over a world in which critical interpretation of the system has become an element of the system itself ” (ES 37). At the same time, perceptive critics of market alienation and the consumption society become critics of modern consumers, whom the former accuse of ruining civilization. What grows in power alongside leftist melancholy is rightist frenzy. Once again, we encounter here accusations of the market, the media, and the spectacle as laments over devastations caused by democracy and its product: the egoistic individual chasing own delight. According to conservative masters, with its anti-​state impetus against traditional authorities, the year 1968 transformed western societies into aggregates of molecules without anchoring, which find themselves at the mercy of capitalist commodification. Therefore, they criticize

506 B.  Stiegler, Mécréance et discrédit 3:  L’esprit perdu du capitalisme, Paris:  Éditions Galilée 2006.

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the reign of consumption, albeit making the proper addressee of their accusations not the system but its users. The democratic citizen the consumer is not a victim but an unwitting agent of tyranny, a sinful collaborator with the system, “a being of excess, an insatiable devourer of commodities, human rights and televisual spectacles” (HD 88). In this way, the conservatives employ Marxist critique of democracy as a mask of economic exploitation, except that in place of the system the situate the “democratic individual” while identifying democracy with individualism and consumption. Rightist frenzy and leftist melancholy are two faces of the same phenomenon: the reversal of the critical model that used to reveal market laws as the ultimate truth of beautiful appearances, thus recruiting an army of fighters. Critical thought endlessly deciphers misleading images, the illusions concealing the reality of misery and subjection, while reaching  –​from Barthes’s Mythologies to Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle  –​ever higher degrees of freneticism. However, the final message resembles that of the conservatives, who reprove the modern world’s degeneracy: the more we try to break the power of the beast, the greater its ultimate triumph. There happens a final disconnection of critical procedures and their intentionality. The melancholics engage in the practice of the enlightened mind deciphering symptoms of illness, but they refuse to assume the roles of physicians (ES 37-​38). The endless critique of the system finally identifies with a declaration of its own purposelessness, culminating in symptomatic attacks on democracy, which is called “the rule of anyone,” enarithmoi, always criticized by those who identify themselves as the educated. However, the work of their thought is simultaneously blocked by a procedural error connected with the logic of suspicion, or more broadly, with the logic of explication: “Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established” (POA 49). We then put ourselves in the position of the master who enlightens the masses stuck in false awareness or non-​recognition. This can only be avoided by setting in motion another procedure, the one beginning from the axiom of equality, and verifying it through practice. What is interesting in this case is Rancière’s critique of situationism. It is based on the reconstruction of a perverse dialectic and analysis of thusly profiled discourse’s functionality. In the first place, it is about the idea of spectacle, or as Guy Debord writes, the contemporary integrated spectacle, which synthesizes the dispersed spectacule (market democracy) and the concentrated spectacle (bureaucratic systems). What is the spectacle? It is the “ruling order’s non-​stop discourse about itself, its never-​ending monologue of self-​praise.” It is tautological, because its means are identical to its purpose, and that purpose is the production of alienation. Capital has reached such a degree of accumulation that it has

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become an image: “to have” transformed into “to be” and then into “to appear.”507 The accumulation of commodity abundance has released “an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desire.”508 The liberation of one’s spontaneous and creative nature seems impossible, because nature itself has become part of the spectacle, and like everything, became distanced by assuming the form of an illusory representation. Hence, the spectacle is not a collection of images hiding the truth. It is sheer social activity and capital, which exist as a separate reality. Rancière comments that this situation is somewhat reminiscent of Plato’s allegory of the cave: one takes images for reality (ES 44). The more the spectator observes, the less she is, and even a philosopher cannot remedy the situation. This is the moment when the Marxist tradition transforms into “the idea that there is nothing behind the surface, that is the place where all things are equivalent, where everything is equivalent with its image with its own lie. Thus the dogmatism of the hidden truth has become the nihilism of the ubiquitous lie of the market.”509 For Rancière, the situation exemplifies the failure of thought. Nothing can resist it, there remains no rest, while the dialectic will absorb everything and always land on its feet. Meanwhile, the current situation opposes Debord’s vision. We do not live in societies of the spectacle, in which reality has been lost, but in societies of the billboard, because we have lost faith in appearances, “which is not the opposite of reality, the cave, but the proper scene of manifestation”510 (MDS 14). The discourse of power only reinforces such an image –​as shadows of ideas and politics obscure the reality of the market, production, and consumption –​and the associated message: “Stop doing theater. We are no longer in an age of theater!” As a result, politics proper is relegated to history (MP 69–​70). As a reality devoid of exteriority, the spectacle disallows any critical distance. We can analyze it only in the language of the spectacle: It is obvious that ideas alone cannot lead beyond the existing spectacle; at most, they can only lead beyond existing ideas about the spectacle. To actually destroy the society of the spectacle, people must set a practical force into motion. A critical theory of the spectacle cannot be true unless it unites with the practical current of negation in society.511

507 G.  Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. K. Knabb, London: Rebel Press 2005, p. 13. 508 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 34. 509 Carevale, Kelsey, “Art of the Possible,” p. 267. 510 Fr. “L’apparence n’est pas le contraire de la réalité, la caverne, mais proprement la scène de la manifestation.” 511 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 111.

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How, then, do we make philosophy a moment of revolutionary practice? Certainly not by placing oneself in an impossible external position, outside the society of the spectacle and “above own times.”512 Debord projects a practice of making art that could elude the mechanism of alienating commodification. A practice of this kind can be the psycho-​geographic actions of the situationists or urban drift –​Debord’s cinematic “strategic iconoclasm” that utterly reduced the image513 –​along with verbal creativity understood as a technique of creating new behaviors, disrupting the established circulation of words and thoughts by means of “hijacking” (détournement) the official discourse and reversing its message, meaning recontextualizing extracted fragments within the framework of anti-​ideology’s fluid language. The new era is to be born from game and conflict, not from theory, which is only a moment of revolutionary practice.514 However, where Giorgio Agamben sees unity and says that Debord perceived his times as a war –​his life being an engagement in strategizing515 –​that is where Rancière introduces a rupture, an incoherence. Rancière is interested in the disconnect between theoretical activity and life strategy. Here, fitting the Marxist scheme, the denouncer of the spectacle’s omnipotence simultaneously fashions himself as a player who opposes the system with nothing else but his way of life. Debord’s critique both dismantles the spectacle and reveals his powerlessness faced with the spectacle’s omnipotence; meanwhile, his activity operates against the critique, having more in common with the life of artistic bohemia than with the world of Capital (ETP 614). This inconsistency determined the trajectory of the situationist discourse: “developing into a radical critique of politics in the 1960s, and absorbed today into the routine of the disenchanted discourse that acts as the ‘critical’ stand-​in for the existing order” (POA 3). In other words, situationism has aged ugly: its revolutionary potential has blended into the new landscape created by the counter-​ revolution of global capitalism, its critique has become trivialized and mixed with the resentful thought of disillusioned revolutionaries who stigmatize the 512 G. Debord, “Les Erreurs et les échecs de M. Guy Debord par un Suisse impartial,” in: Guy Debord. Un art de la guerre, eds. E. Guy, L. Le Bras, Paris: BnF/​Gallimard 2013, p. 210. Fr. “Se placer ‘au-​dessus de son temps.’” 513 P.  Mościcki, My też mamy już przeszłość. Guy Debord i  historia jako pole bitwy, Warsaw: IBL PAN 2015, pp. 58–​62. 514 G.  Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Still and Document, trans. K. Knabb, Edinburgh: AK Press 2003, pp. 150–​151, 515 G.  Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” in: T. McDonough ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, Cambridge: MIT Press 2002.

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media reality and mass society. The tradition of rebels joined the mainstream of contemporaneity marked by mourning after politics. We can best notice the above if we were to draw lines of continuity between the society of the spectacle and the theory of simulation. Jean Baudrillard defines simulation as the substitution of signs in place of reality, bringing for the “operational doppelganger.” Unlike mere pretending, simulation violates the principle of reality: reality can no longer be distinguished from its description, interpretation, or representation; we cannot reach its unmediated level. We have at our disposal only likenesses that cannot resemble anything, because they refer to other representations. In our semiurgic society, gripped by the madness of producing signs, the message devours its own content: it exhausts itself in the enactment of meaning. Simulated aesthetic or political radicalism is one of the basic elements of successful staging, in which every idea is replaced by the pleasure function. Advertising  –​“the triumph of superficial form” and “zero sense”  –​consumes all messages that co-​create this antitheatre of communication.516 Meanwhile, art reaches for proven conventions, entering the final stage of development, the stage of regret and resentment, parody and palinode. Seemingly subversive artistic gestures are a sham activity, aimed at creating an illusion that there is a stable system of aesthetic values. The illusion is also sustained by the conspiracy of critics, journalists, and publishers who maintain the marketing illusion and skillfully stimulate the “commercial madness.”517 Baudrillard’s radically monistic vision leaves no place for resistance, critique, or negativity of any kind. In his essays, we hear a postmodern lament over the unrepresentable and a melancholic adieu to the utopian dreams of the past, toward “modern madness of the idea of a self-​emancipation of mankind’s humanity” (POA 24). By the way, the lamentation over the excess of images and commodities originates in nineteenth-​century thought, which simultaneously explores the paralyzing multiplicity of stimuli and the rules of popular plurality called democracy. The critique of consumption society vividly recalls complaints of nineteenth-​century elites, terrified of the new forms of life and social changes, symbolized by Emma Bovary and the International Workingmen’s Association. This terror engendered the elites’ fatherly concern that continues today in the form of conservative paternalism: “doctors need these patients to look after … they need to reproduce them indefinitely” (ES 47–​48). However, the experience

516 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 80. 517 J.  Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans. A. Hodges, New York: Semiotext(e)/​MIT Press 2005.

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of commodity, ideological, and verbal excess elicits other reactions as well. One is progressive (leftist) melancholy, another incites violent rebellion at the level of life strategy (Debord), yet another (that of the postmodernists) is the perverse delight in the proliferation of images and the promiscuity of meanings, the marriage of melancholy and nihilism. How do we escape this vicious circle? It suffices to begin from different assumptions: to assume that there is no hidden secret of the machine, no fatal mechanism but for dissensus, meaning the endless distribution of the sensible and the senseful: “Dissensus brings back into play both the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world” (ES 49). The conviction that we are in the belly of the beast is a measure of our enslavement, but it does remain a conviction. We need not verify or falsify a conviction; we only need to actively let it go. However, for this to become possible, we must become insensitive to the cries of the “discursive police.”518

Poetics of Knowledge I would say that my approach is a bit similar to Foucault’s. It retains the principle from the Kantian transcendental that replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility. At the same time, these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression. I differ from Foucault insofar as his archaeology seems to me to follow a schema of historical necessity according to which, beyond a certain chasm, something is no longer thinkable, can no longer be formulated … I thus try at one and the same to historicize the transcendental and to de-​historicize these systems of conditions of possibility (POA 50).

Similarity and difference. Althusser’s rebellious student invents another master only to philosophize against him. Let us begin by noting that the above statement –​a rare one in Rancière’s texts –​points to a positive tradition in contemporary philosophy. He refers to it while multiplying caveats and making necessary corrections. In Rancière’s view, Michel Foucault’s work is subject to a dangerous fusion while forgetting the dynamic and historical nature of the work of thought. After all, Foucault warns: “I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you. … I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to

518 M. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in:  Untying the Text:  A Post-​Structuralist Reader, ed. R. Young, London and New York: Routledge 1981, p. 61.

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have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.”519 Of course, many commentators notice Foucault’s discontinuities and cuts, separate periods, and point to periods of silence that separate them.520 Nevertheless, the thinkers who benefit from his legacy –​such as Agamben or Negri and Hardt –​ try to establish its final intentionality, ensuring its coherence to create the basis for a new politics or ethics. It may seem that the Foucault and Rancière do similar work: they play with “local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges”521 against a unified theoretical instance by willingly reaching for secondary literature, utilitarian texts, and marginalia. They explore the conditions of possibility for texts, ideas, value systems, and social norms and organizations. However, the quote opening this chapter points to a fundamental difference. Kantian transcendentalism historicized in the spirit of Foucault can turn into a theory of systemic determinants, while the reconstruction of an era’s epistemological field can result in a homogenizing vision, in which subjects immersed in time unconditionally follow the historical a priori.522 Stubbornly seeking a way out of the vicious circle of surveillance and impotence, Rancière goes against Foucault and attempts to de-​historicize systems of conditions of possibility, to unseal coordinate systems and open the horizon of the era. Early Foucault introduces the category of episteme, which he does not define precisely –​according to his declaration followed by the choice of a purely descriptive method –​but we can identify it with the system of thought proper to a given historical period. In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the Renaissance, classical, and modern episteme, but he does not explain the mechanism of transition from one to another, which emphasizes the discontinuity of history, that is to change in leaps, cuts, and dodges, but it simultaneously blocks reflection on the mechanisms of these transformations, thus preventing a reflection on possible future changes. The definition of episteme appears in Foucault’s later Archaeology of Knowledge: it is a “set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; … The episteme is not a form of knowledge

519 Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, p. 23. 520 See B.  Han, L’Ontologie manquée de Michel Foucault, Grenoble: Jérôme Millon 1998. 521 M.  Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–​1976, trans. D. Macey, New York: Picador 2003, p. 91. 522 M. Potte-​Bonneville, “Versions du politique: Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault,” in: La Philosophie déplacée, pp.  182–​184.

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(connaissance) or type of rationality.”523 As we know, Rancière replaces the figure of episteme with an original mix of concepts, some of which are ahistorical (distribution of the sensible, police and politics, disagreement), other historicized (aesthetic regimes). However, even the latter do not describe the distinct and separate modes of rationality separated by strong cuts, only modes of representation, while transitions between them are stretched in time, blurred, and indefinite. The differences between the two philosophers are even more pronounced when it comes to discourse theory, which replaces episteme theory in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault argues that discourse determines what can be said and thought, and also who says or thinks what and when. Meanings are formulated not in language itself but in relations of knowledge and power, within a particular discursive field, in which certain content may be articulated at the expense of another. In any society, the production of discourse is simultaneously controlled and redistributed by a number of procedures, such as exclusion, which operates through prohibition (object taboo, ritual of circumstance, privileged or exclusive right of the speaking subject) or through division and rejection (the opposition of reason and madness, waking dream and actual dreaming).524 Foucault attempts two kinds of inquiry, which dominated the first and second phases of his oeuvre:  in archaeological (critical) research, he attempts to capture the multiple forms of discursive exclusion and limitation. However, his analysis of the internal formative rules of discourse leads him to questions about their etiology and their connection to nondiscursive social practices. Thus, Foucault analyzes how series of discourses took shape, along with what were the conditions of their emergence, growth, and mutation. While discourse archaeology studies the processes of dilution, regrouping, and unification of discourses, discourse genealogy studies processes of discourse formation. These practices are not disjointed but interact in a process of problematization,525 namely by uncovering the game of domination and revealing the balance of power that generates concrete manifestations of reality. Foucault focuses on specific discourses and reconstructs their genealogy. The psychiatric discourse responsible for the medicalization of insanity turns out to be closely linked to the emergence of isolation facilities; the clinical discourse defining “the philosophical status of man” derives from “the overall reorganization

523 Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, p. 212. 524 Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” p. 52. 525 Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” p. 73.

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of the hospital field;”526 the judicial discourse stems from transformations in penal power, and so forth. According to Rancière, this powerful antiquarian endeavor moves inexorably toward a new version of historical determinism: by juggling documents, archivist the master conclusively proves that subjects can only think what they think, thus undermining the will to change by making it unthinkable (MP 157). Indeed, according to Foucault’s declaration, this critical-​ genealogical research has a practical dimension. It is about designing a possible transgression of discourse and determining conditions for change. Writing down histories of the queer –​the insane, the sick, the imprisoned –​is supposed to serve not only a reconstruction of what is excluded from the public sphere but also a questioning of any obviousness that supports “governmentality.” However, Rancière argues that knowledge of the disciplinary system does not encourage revolt; an uncrossable gap thus opens between knowledge and action (MP 158). An original attempt to reverse the causal logic –​according to which there is a deeper, underground order that conditions what is perceivable and thinkable –​is Rancière’s reformulation of the historicized apriorism by using the concepts of disagreement and aisthesis. First, polemology takes the place of archaeology and genealogy. As Foucault declares, it is not about finding in “the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”527 The point is to recognize the consequences of this contingency; to see in the mésentente a fundamental dimension of human experience, which consists of a constant negotiation of the distribution of the sensible (the perceivable, comprehensible, and argumentable), the shape of the world (distribution of time and space), and the shape of the community (distribution of voice, civil rights, and human features); to recognize dissensus as the “natural” state of communication, meaning it derives from the wandering of words, from the circulation of omniscient and metaphorical terms; and to perceive the presence of dissensus –​more or less hidden –​in the past and the present. This is connected to the second moment of Rancière’s reformulation:  aesthetics takes the place of epistemology and the exploration of moving borders that mark the surface; analysis of the sensorically accessible common world –​ analysis of cognitive determinants and rapid changes in modes of rationality. We may interpret the very idea of “distribution of the sensible” as a translation

526 M.  Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, London and New York:  Routledge 2003, p. 243–​246. 527 M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” trans. C. Porter, in: The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books 1984, p. 46.

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and creative betrayal of Foucault’s genealogical thought. Against a theory that fixes the visible and the utterable in the limits of the era, the distribution of the sensible draws attention to the multiformity of cognition and the world’s eternal unreadiness, to the adventures of thought and word that tear apart the web of historical conditions. The distribution of the sensible rejects the idea of cuts and sudden faults to sensitize us to the synchronicity of different times, to repetitions and anachronisms, recurrences and anticipations. Aesthetic experience becomes the experience of dissensus, allowing the subject to escape mechanisms of control, to disassociate from socially constituted nature instead of passively incorporating knowledge, order, and law.528 The point is that every distribution of the sensible –​and, by consequence, every social order –​is contingent, so the lines that structure the sensible are arbitrary and vulnerable to reconfiguration. The sine qua non condition for the repartition of this distribution is not the act of an individual or group that were “made-​aware” or incited to revolt. The potentiality of revolt is inscribed in the temporality of the distribution and the arbitrariness of borders, but it actualizes in very diverse (political, aesthetic, “spiritual”) acts of liberation that may be both collective and individual. Moreover, Rancière crosses out another concept central to Foucault’s reflection: power. As we know, Foucault’s created the conception of power that is non-​ essential and omnipresent, dispersed throughout the social body, practices, and individuals, while simultaneously being productive and closely linked to procedures of the production and control of knowledge. The dominant knowledge model supports the process of control and normalization of individuals with its reverse being processes of exclusion and punishment of those who fail to conform. However, the power-​knowledge system does not operate based solely on prohibition and exclusion. Foucault rejects the “hypothesis of repression” and opposes it with the concept of positive and productive power responsible for creating knowledge and setting it in motion, bringing objects into existence and producing individuals. Power produces reality, so the individual and knowledge derive from that production. Meanwhile, Rancière argues that the notion of power (and biopower) truly neutralizes the chance to conceive of politics as such, as heterogeneous to the social order.529 Politics would be a momentary phenomenon without a specific logic, marked by the instability of relations of domination and subordination, control and acts of resistance. Domination and

528 J. Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, Paris: La fabrique éditions 2008, p. 57. 529 A.  Birnbaum, Trajectoires obliques. Michel Foucault, Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe, Jean-​ Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Paris: Sens and Tonka 2013, p. 129.

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its contestation are strongly intertwined processes, and a careful look at the testimonies of history contradicts the idea of capillary power that dissipates in everyday practices and reproduces itself at the “microphysical level.” In Foucault’s case, the lack of theoretical interest in politics seems telling. In fact, by detailing various technologies of power, he creates a theory of the police state (ETP 244–​245). Foucault demonstrates in a thousand ways that the individual internalizes surveillance and does not recognize it, that the individual is stuck in a dungeon of discipline and ignorance. Rancière presents a different picture. He merely describes the “prison of labor” (title of the first chapter in Le Philosophe plébéien), the torture of stolen time and lost opportunities, but this description is only the starting point for other studies and stories: how “heretical knowledge” (SP 37) becomes an instrument of emancipation; how the subject transcends the disciplinary universe through the power of stolen words; how the subject ceases to be the effect of “subjection”530 thanks to an impossible identification with the other. Only by abandoning the attractive but false ideas of “power” and “domination” understood as generic names for a coherent system of oppression that we can discern an autonomous history of emancipation, that constellation of monadic and egalitarian moments (EQT 31). At first, Foucault declares that the fundamental problem of his work is power, later that it is the subject.531 We may transform this succession into a relation of implication. What influences the philosophy of the subject is the theory of power formulated earlier, especially the lack of reflection about politics. Indeed, politics introduces emanations of equality,532 releasing the emancipatory potential of individuals and groups capable of redistributing knowledge and creating egalitarian communities (based on the assumption of the “equality of minds”). Of course, we could make a symmetrical argument against Rancière and say that by overemphasizing the deregulatory powers of speech and politics, he forgets the power of prohibition and the effects of internalized control533 or that his sophistical concept of the “politics of aesthetics” serves only to bracket the reality

530 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage 1995, pp. 26–​30. 531 M.  Foucault, Dits et écrits, Vol. 2, Paris: Gallimard 2001, pp. 402, 1042. 532 Equality never had theoretical significance for Foucault, which turns into another of Rancière’s objections (ETP 160–​161). 533 Fišerova, Partager le visible, pp.  70–​71.

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of biopower and leave the terrain of biopolitical culture.534 Indeed, Rancière reflects less about compulsion itself and more about the conditions of its transgression. Nevertheless, Rancière designs his own poetics of knowledge: it serves to analyze discursive procedures, which enable a particular form of knowledge to constitute itself as a mode of truth within the parameters established by the historical frame.535 We see it most clearly in Rancière’s reflections on historiography. Rancière presents history as a discipline that owes its coherence –​choice of subjects, research methods, and narrative strategies –​to the anxiety of a “non-​science,” in which the personification of “non-​science” is literature. The central problem of historiography is that to gain the status of a truthful discourse, it must pass through poetics; to become a science, it must dissociate itself from literature. History is a combination of actions, which means that it does not simply contain this or that, a simple list or catalog, for it is a specific configuration that links facts and makes them visible.536 Being neither a formal nor an experimental science, history has no verification protocol. Sociology or ethnology operate on the same epistemological-​political terrain, but they have procedures for proving their scientificity like statistics or field visits. History, deprived of these legitimations, multiplies the discursive modes through which it establishes itself as a science. Above all, history constitutes itself in opposition to the historical novel: that is why historians of the old school were so concerned with the reliability of sources, and historians of the new school have done their homework on geography, statistics, and demography. However, despite all this effort, history is forced to play the role of a poor cousin of the newly established social sciences, condemned to perpetual approximations, confusion of opinions, and multiple interpretations. There is a reason why history has to this day retained the name we give to fables (raconter des histoires). It remains torn between scientific and narrative contracts (NoH 9) both in its old and new forms. In the past, the form of historical narrative until the First World War was a narrative about the lives of kings and saints, about the fates of states and nations.

534 J. McSweeney, “Culture and/​or Politics? Rancière, Foucault and the Problem of Biopower,” in: Representation and Contestation: Cultural Politics in a Political Century, eds. Ching-​Yu Lin, J. McSweeney, Amsterdam–​New York: Rodopi 2010, p. 195. 535 G. Rockhill, “The Silent Revolution,” SubStance 33.1/​2004, p. 63. See R. Birrell, “Jacques Rancière and The (Re)Distribution of the Sensible: Five Lessons in Artistic Research,” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2.1/​2008. 536 Rancière, Figures of History, p. 7–​8.

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Drawing generously and unabashedly on literary techniques and supported by historical testimony, history told “what really happened,” casting in the leading roles the mighty, the great, and personified nations. This changed after the First World War thanks to the activities of the Annales school, founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and popularized by Fernand Braudel. The process of “disciplining” historiography by applying terms and methods taken from the arsenal of social sciences has begun. The new science about the past renounced the storytelling of old and set itself the task of recognizing the deep, determining structure, the socioeconomic tangle that determines the course of history. In the spirit of scientism, history began to search beneath the faint surface of political events for something permanent, some substrate of the past, discovering successive levels of social, economic, and natural (geographical, climatic) conditioning. The Copernican Revolution of historical sciences consisted in recognizing the most important actor in history: the crowd of nameless inhabitants of past eras. Because it did not leave behind many testimonies that could be studied, scholars need provide the crowd with a language. The language spoken by the anonymous multitude is the language of numbers and functions, statistics and graphs. What became the unsurpassed ideal of history that gained the position of science was the use of words and verbal narration merely as a commentary to data. Periods of longue durée of material civilization and life of the masses became the proper focus of interest. This is evident in Braudel’s canonical treatise The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), in which each individual –​even the king! –​appears as a function of profound determinants, meaning economic and social factors, along with geography and climate. In his theoretical writings, Braudel postulates a shift of scientific history away from short time, measured in years, from events and short-​term conjunctures to long units of duration. The first approach is stuck in “a short time span, proportionate to individuals, to daily life,” sharing the pains of chronicling and journalism. Indeed, “the short time span is the most capricious and the most delusive of all,” so it must be converted under the new discipline to long stretches of time, “a slower tempo, which sometimes almost borders on the motionless.” Only then can we bring forth the structure of history, meaning its organization, “a coherent and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities and social masses.”537 Rancière’s critique of the Annales school –​which is by no means a nostalgic rehabilitation of the old school of history  –​consists of several points. First,

537 F.  Braudel, On History, trans. S. Matthews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982, p. 28; 33; 31.

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Febvre and his students dismantle the old historiographical narrative, which projected linearity, continuity, and intentionality onto the past, a legacy of the Enlightenment. In this place, they introduce notions of epoch, mentality, and longue durée. These construct a kind of eternity, with its social truth doubling the short time intervals to which we are used by slicing the past and the surface phenomena called events.538 There is nothing natural or obvious about this process. History is constructed here not through “observation” but through a specific discourse, much like the unconscious in psychoanalysis. The philosopher chooses to reveal the unconscious of historical discourse. As Hayden White writes in the preface to the English translation of Rancière’s book,539 it is not a matter of discovering the “poetic structure of knowledge” but about exploring with the tools of the poetics of knowledge the inventive way in which a scientific discipline is constructed. The sociological toolkit helps the new historians escape literariness, liberate the object of study from linguistic indeterminacy, and contrast deceptive speech with the universal language of mathematics (NoH 6). Rancière focuses not only on the writings of scholars associated with the Annales school but also reconstructs the positions of François Furet and historians associated with Marxism. For Furet, the French Revolution results not so much from political action as from a defective power structure. First, there had to be a state of “society without a state”540 so that revolution could occupy an empty space using the democratic slogans of people’s power. On the other hand, Marxists project all phenomena onto a past/​future timeline. The predomination of the future, from whose viewpoint the past must be judged, sets in motion the notions of lateness, immaturity, backwardness, and ignorance on the part of the historical actor; supplemented, of course, with historian’s maturity, progressiveness, and knowledge. Marx’s formula “men make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it” –​approvingly quoted by

538 J. Rancière, “Le Concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien,” L’Inactuel 6/​ 1996, p. 57. 539 H. White, “Foreword:  Rancière’s Revisionism,” in:  J. Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. H. Melehy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1994, pp. VII–​XIX. 540 F.  Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981, p. 24, calls this society without a state an autonomy of the social factor in relation the political factor.

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Levi-​Strauss541 –​returns in the research of new historians who say that not everything can be deduced from testimonies: under the bright surface and bustle of phenomena there lies a dark and silent depth, accessible only by historian armed with the research tools of the new social sciences.542 Marxists and political conservatives –​intellectuals who stand on both sides of the ideological barricade –​ unite in a common effort to reject the narrative character of history, negate its eventness, and relegate to oblivion the category of causality. If they were to reconstruct the four main theses of this historiography,543 they could read as follows: 1. History has always been narrative and inevitably is such, but as with its institutionalization and professionalization, it has attempted to negate its affinities with literature. 2. Despite abandoning the history of kings and battles, the authority of history was entrusted to the professional historian rather than to “the poor.” In place of the myths of collectivity, the new scientific norm introduces a narrative of geographical space, great units of era and civilization, and strict descriptive procedures. The people remain silent witnesses to territorial and epochal meaning. Historians invent a way of speaking for the poor so that they remain mute; which we may easily see already in “Romantic” historiography by Michelet (NoH 46). Historians give visibility to the poor while silencing them. Historical narrative assumes a police character: it is not at all about what ordinary people said in the past but about what they wanted to say; the replacement of dire by vouloir-​dire. 3. For fear of anachronism, historians over-​contextualize facts, thereby losing access to exception and deviation. Like Febvre in the 1942 book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, they assume the homogeneity of thought, mentality, and worldview of the people of a given period. They make a false homogenization by pacifying the unpredictable, the unusual, and the exceptional, and they underestimate the role of individual social actors. 4. All this blinds historians to the dynamics of revolutionary processes –​which by their very nature transcend the “epochal context” –​because they arise in

541 The second part of this maxim would “justify ethnology.” C. Lévi-​Strauss Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest, New York: Basic. Books Publisher 1963, p. 23. 542 Braudel, On History, pp.  39-​40. 543 A similar systematization is proposed by Oliver Davis, in: Jacques Rancière, pp.  62–​63.

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conjunction with the excesses of language and are sometimes the work of unstable, mobile, or floating subjects (des sujets flottant; D 100). Therefore, historiography should come to terms with its narrative and literary nature, explore the multiplicity of roads and their unexpected intersections through which travels the multiplicity of experiences of the visible and the utterable (NoH 102–​103). Contrary to Furet or Braudel, revolutions are events linked to verbal excess; fragments of wandering texts –​ writings of the ancients, the sacred word, formulas of sovereignty  –​decontextualized and assimilated following an “illegitimate” logic, which suddenly begin to resound in the street and fill the so-​called ordinary life. When uttered again, they reveal the specific novelty of the anachronistic. Thus, we witness the birth of the political moment invariably associated with desynchronization, with the stratification of temporality. The disease of politics is the disease of words: “There are too many words, words that designate nothing other than the very targets against which they place weapons in the killers’ hands.” Rancière again recalls the history of the word “tyrant” or “despot” as applied to a legitimate prince or king (NoH 19). Although these were used in the wrong way, they still stigmatized the enemy. What constitutes the scene of politics is these words without a referent (Hobbes complained about their overabundance). Parasitic writings and illegitimate discourses turn the scattered mass of n’importe qui into a political body. We might even speak of a “revolution of paperwork” (révolution de la paperasse; NoH 18), a revolt of scribbling and chatter, which nullifies the legitimate authority of kings and the very principle of the legitimacy of politics, dissipating it in an inexhaustible multiplication of words and speakers. Contrary to the neophyte scientism of the Annales school, history does not develop along the lines drawn by large determinants; its course is also determined by turns of the metaphor and other linguistic extravagances that are completely irreducible to any prior data: “There is history because the speakers are united and divided by names, because they name themselves and name the others with names that don’t have “any close relation” with sets of properties” (NoH 35). To tell the past, we must invent new categories to recover history from the power of the theology of time, the dictates of geography, demography, economics, ethnology, and sociology. Another discipline of scientific thought only contributes to the endless renewal of the Platonic lie,544 with the difference that 544 J. F. Lane, “Rancière’s Anti-​Platonism. Equality, the “Orphan Letter” and the Problematic of the Social Sciences,” in: Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière,

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individuals are immobilized in the place assigned to them by something other than the law of “natural” order, namely great spatial, temporal, civilizational, and cultural structures. In Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, Braudel writes that we are defined by what we do not know: everyday life, habits, “those thousands of acts that flower and reach fruition without anyone’s having made a decision, acts of which we are not even fully aware.” Rancière does not deny we are imprisoned by “countless inherited acts, accumulated pell-​mell and repeated time after time to this very day,”545 but he nevertheless is interested in what breaks the routine and frees the individual from the automatism of repetition, radically changing her world and the world of his fellow neighbors. Rancière finds traces of such movements in the past and considers conditions of possibility for escaping the necessities camouflaged in everyday life banalities.

Paradox of the Spectator The historicity of individuals and societies remains one of the great themes of Brecht’s work. Roland Barthes writes that if Brecht’s dramaturgy remains aligned with the great progressive veins of thought of the age, because it aids history by revealing its processes, it “intervenes in history” in the belief that the world is susceptible to change:546 “Those who lead the country into the abyss /​Call ruling too difficult /​For ordinary men.”547 Brecht writes in an accusatory tone to restore the simple person’s faith in her power to transform the world. He certainly belongs to the group of twentieth-​ century writers and thinkers who successfully escape nihilism. Moreover, Brecht distance himself from modern cynicism or –​to put it in Peter Sloterdijk’s terms –​the “subliminal illusionlessness,” the extinction of communal beliefs, the dissipation of vital energies, and “the listlessness of egoisms.”548 For Brecht, the spread of the integrated asocial type is not a sign of the times or result of a disenchanted world but the effect of successful manipulation or engineering that cleverly correlates interactions of political coercion and ideological formatting

ed. O. Davis, Cambridge: Polity Press 2013, pp. 28–​46. 545 F.  Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. P. M. Ranum, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1977, p. 7. 546 R. Barthes, “The Brechtian Revolution,” trans. R. Howard, in: Barthes, Critical Essays, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1972, p. 38. 547 B. Brecht, “Those Who Take the Meat From the Table,” trans. T. Kuhn and D. Constantine, in: The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, New York: Liveright 2018, p. 593. 548 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 6.

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of consciousness. This engineering must be contrasted with planned and self-​ conscious action that would reverse the subjectification processes. Because these processes are constructive, formative, and cohesive, literature’s critical work must presuppose the deformation and introduction of discontinuities and, as such, resembles a systematic reassembling. This is how we should understand the declaration from the intermedium of the drama Man Equals Man: Tonight you are going to see a man reassembled like a car Leaving all his individual components just as they are. … Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes you’ll feel the ground on which you stand Slither between your toes like shifting sand So that the case of Galy Gay the porter makes you aware Life on this earth is a hazardous affair.549

Brecht removes the ground from under the feet of readers and viewers. He precludes his work to enter any of the appropriating discourses and provokes –​ again using Barthes’ term –​“a shock upon logosphere”550 serving to demythologize the circulating explanatory systems. Brecht’s oeuvre makes us judge and shocks us, but it also operates with distance, it wants to have an impact without absorbing us. Brecht undermines illusionistic techniques and dismantles hypnotic fields, because he does not rely either on captivating the viewer or, contrary to appearances, even on building self-​knowledge. As Althusser argues, this project’s strength lies in the gesture of rejection. The point is that there is no presentation of a clear message that would refer to some form of self-​knowledge. Collective self-​knowledge is the primary seat of ideology, so the critique of the illusions upon which consciousness feeds must be done differently:  by maximizing the tension between ideologically alienated consciousness and the actual conditions of its existence.551 On a deeper level, there is a constant struggle in Brecht’s theater. It is an endless struggle against pedagogy, the logic of demystification and explanation. Brecht seeks a way to influence beyond the principle of explication, to provoke with other means a crisis of dominant representations and personal models, thus changing the attitude that appears toward them in readers or spectators.

549 B. Brecht, Man Equals Man and the Elephant Calf, New York: Arcade Publishing 2000, p. 38. 550 R. Barthes, ”Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity,” in: R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard, Oakland: University of California Press 1989, pp. 212–​214. 551 Althusser, On Marx, pp. 142–​146.

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Therefore, the elementary principle of epic theater is to generate incongruence wherever possible, and juxtapose situations that criticize one other. It is a move that has the potential to shift the boundaries of the visible and the utterable. Nevertheless, as Rancière argues, Brecht does not always emerge unscathed from this struggle. His characteristic militant orthodoxy repeatedly contradicts both his artistic aims and the needs of the movement he intends to serve (P 117). However, there is more, as scholars frequently repeat this one accusation toward Brecht; suffice it to recall Adorno’s speeches regarding The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which he criticizes the undialectical simplifications and ideological falsifications of political analysis.552 Brecht sometimes emerges scathed because of the uncontrollable impact of his new form. Set in motion, the game at the same time confirms and ruins the grand theses of orthodoxy, at every moment it “reveals the truth and simultaneously prevents any polits of truth” (P 143).553 In  The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière presents the project of epic theater as one of two model responses to the crisis of art. Theatrical reformers refuse to come to terms with the passivity of the spectator who –​drawn into the circle of illusion –​ renounces the privilege of independent thought for the pleasure of passive identification. Looking for remedies, the reformers exploit two generalized rectification formulas. According to the first one, which is most fully realized in Antoine Artaud’s theater of cruelty, all distance must be eliminated, and the spectator must be forced to abandon his customary position. Disinherited from the state of illusory intellectual control over the performance, she will transform into an existence possessed by vital energies. According to the other formula, the spectator should increase her distance, refine her gaze, assume the role of a scientist-​experimenter who observes phenomena and investigates their causes (ES 4-​5). This is the case of epic theater. These reformatory actions have opposite vectors, but seek the same, namely restoring the theater to its original character of a popular gathering or communal ceremony. Brecht is neither a nihilist nor a cynic, nor an ironist, understood as someone who celebrates the duplicity of truth. Instead, he is a dialectician, namely a humorist who practices truth as doubling (P 114), meaning that which reveals in the practice of doubling, overlapping, and merging incommensurables and opposites. Hence, the specific effect of scintillating representation, which Brecht conceptualizes as the “distancing effect” (Verfremdungeffekt), namely the constant

552 T. W. Adorno, “Commitment” in: Adorno, T. W. et al. Aesthetics and Politics, London and New York: Verso Publishing House 1977, pp. 183–​184. 553 Fr. “manifeste la vérité et, en même temps, ce qui empêche toute politique de la vérité.”

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self-​reflexive examination of its mechanisms and negotiation of its relation to reality. Hence the propensity for mixed and hybrid forms, unity of opposites, paradoxes, and aggressive montage. Brecht experimented with this form in the 1940s, when he created War Primer and Journals 1934–​1955, the latter of which includes the poem quoted above.554 Let us begin by illuminating the biographical circumstances surrounding the creation of these diverse works. Brecht began writing them during in the final stage of his exile, which began on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag was set on fire, and which covered Prague, Paris, London, Moscow, Danish Svendborg, Stockholm, Finland, Leningrad, and Los Angeles. Soon after, Brecht settled permanently in East Berlin, where he enjoyed the official recognition of the authorities, which was proven by an award from Stalin. This is a moment of peculiar transformation. Hannah Arendt writes explicitly that Brecht’s famous return to the GDR was the death of the great Brecht –​the emigrant, the searching artist, the freedom fighter –​and the birth of the small Brecht: the intransigent Stalinist, the supporter of Soviet intervention during the East German Uprising of 1953, the regime’s court writer, the author of opportunistic poems.555 In a sense, Journals 1934–​1955 and War Primer are a culmination of a critical project, a testament to the work by which Brecht created an original formula for “non-​territorial” poetry, or wartime poetry, that challenges philosophical delusions and social injustice. In War Primer, Brecht employs the formula of emblem: the visual representation (pictura) is accompanied by two texts: a newspaper (inscriptio) and poetic one (subscriptio). The subsequent photo-​epigrams show a chronological cross-​ section of war, from the conflict in Spain, through Polish September of 1939, to the final liberation. However, contrary to appearances, this structure offers no consolation; it lacks any holistic, unifying narrative or uniform tone, be it lamentational moralistic, or fatalistic. What reigns here absolutely is contradiction. The plays connect with each other based on negation and reversal; moreover, each stages a paradox and turns into a “little dialectical machine.” To depict war, Brecht gathers “documents of nonsense” like a surrealist artist who shifts boundaries in an overly whimsical manner. The macabre documents become dialecticalized. The juxtaposition of images of atrocity with newspaper commentary and short poems is –​on the one hand –​a gesture of breaking narrative continuity,

554 B.  Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1973. 555 H.  Arendt, Vies politiques, Paris: Gallimard 1974, pp. 192–​243.

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putting intervals in place of connections, and on the other hand, a way of linking orders that are spontaneously treated as different. In The Surviving Image, Georges Didi-​Huberman argues that Brecht’s overriding ambition is to deprive the depicted processes of their illusory obviousness. If the photograph of the massacred head of a Japanese soldier stuck on the tank’s turret is accompanied by a poem in which “tank” rhymes with “bank,” then the image of war chaos reveals its lining:  the regularity of the capitalist economy that drives violence. The same quatrain introduces a reference to Hamlet (“Poor Yorick in the jungle with his tank!”).556 This theatrical reference allegorizes the document (the dead soldier as Shakespeare’s clown) while intensifying its ambiguity and unspeakable cruelty. The principle of this little dialectical machine is “the infernal repetition of contradictions” and the permanent “lack of synthesis.” Furthermore, the collection’s title juxtaposes words from seemingly different orders:  war and primer. Brecht contrasts the fascist “pedagogy of death” with a different kind of pedagogy: one that restores the state of ignorance inherent in the process of learning. He wants to return to the moment of initial naivety and recreate the element of anarchy present in every “advocating” and “taking a stand.” Brecht’s play on words is a linguistic wandering in the dark, which allows truth to surface in a casual slip of the tongue or wordplay; for example, by changing “Denker und Richter” into “Denker und Henker,” which turns the Germans as a nation of thinkers and judges into that of thinkers and executioners. Where words prove insufficient, images perform a similar function. For example, Mussolini’s pose and Hitler’s two gestures captured on film are separated by a photograph from an electron microscope showing phagocytes devouring bacteria. Does the poet want to be a scientist who observes war struggles and mine fights under a microscope? Or, perhaps, he remains a child who plays with images and inadvertently reveals the subversive potential of the innocent and naive gaze? However, this “child’s play with the world’s chaos” must come to an end. Brecht rejects the surrealist penchant for strangeness and abandons the Dadaist celebration of the anarchic gesture without end. He makes the world’s chaos the object of his art, but in doing so, he nurtures notions of an ideal order. Ultimately, War Primer remains primer: learning to speak (and look) begins with breaking the world down into its elements. Where ordinary explanations bankrupt, the world must be disassembled to be reassembled in the next move. In his textual and iconic machinations, Brecht explores our ability to see documents of dark history. His work is a primer to restore things to their visibility. There is an

556 B.  Brecht, Kriegsfibel, Berlin: Eulenspiegel 2008, p. 45.

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ethical and ideological dimension to this project, for it is ultimately a matter of creating an “effective form,” one that produces the desired shock in the viewer and urges them to take a stand. Didi-​Huberman devotes an exceptional part of his essay to reflections on montage, understood as a particular cognitive method:  to disorganize what things appear when, to juxtapose heterogeneous elements, to displace, and to decompose are all techniques for developing a critical distance from popular notions, historical concepts, and aesthetic illusions. Brecht achieves his Verfremdungeffekt primarily through montage methods: they allow him to constantly “show that you are showing” and to transform mimetic illusion into a cognitive issue. In a sense, the effect of strangeness presupposes montage, since “to distance is to demonstrate by dismantling the relationships of things shown together and joined according to their differences”557 The point of this artistic combination is to reveal something concealed by standardized representations, which by no means resembles “depth,” “hidden meaning,” or “dark source,” but rather a network of relations, the fields of tension that generate reality and its images. During his many years as a wartime refugee, Brecht also worked on a journal. He read newspapers and collects clippings –​texts, maps, economic charts, war photographs, portraits of leaders, artwork reproductions –​to include them in his Journals 1934–​1955. The idea surfaces already in the title’s ambiguity, Arbeitsjournal: it is as much a writer’s diary as a news diary, a collection of current reports from the front line. The confrontation of personal stories with world history is arranged to create transitions between private and public and to explore the limits of expression. What we encounter, then, is a broad panorama of wartime devastation and loss and a grim picture of the immediate postwar years, when open armed conflict transformed into a cold war, and eternal exploitation drapes robes of new poverty. It works in its own way, as much avoiding “pure immersion, the in-​itself, the soil of the too-​near” as “pure abstraction, haughty transcendence.”558 However, he is not quite able to protect himself from the pedagogical attitude and its ascribed explicative logic. This is what Rancière indicates in his ambivalent texts on Brecht. The theater, one of the archetypal forms of “politicized” art, oscillates between forms of

557 G. Didi-​Huberman, Quand les images prennent position. L’œil de l’histoire, 1, Paris: Editions de Minuit 2009, p. 70. Fr. “Distancier, c’est démontrer en démontant les rapports de choses montrées ensemble et ajointées selon leurs différences.” 558 G. Didi-​Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, p. 12. Fr. “L’immersion pure, l’en-​soi, le terreau du trop-​près” … “l’abstraction pure, la transcendance hautaine.”

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political pedagogy and artistic modernism. Brecht often manages to maintain this balance: He constantly plays between means of coming to political awareness and means of undermining the legitimacy of great art, which found expression in the theatre by admixtures with the “minor” performing arts:  marionette shows, pantomime performances, the circus, the music hall or cabaret, not to mention boxing. His “epic theatre” is a combination between a pedagogical logic legitimated by the Marxist corpus and, on the other hand, techniques of fragmentation and the mixture of opposites chat are specific to the history of theatre and production in the 1910s and 1920s (POA 62–​63).

The problem is that this combination is risky, in the sense that the fragmentation techniques have an uncontrollable subversive potential. It is an attempt to interweave two politics of literature: one that uses textual signs of the world to build a powerful subjectivity capable of changing it, and another one that focuses on the play of intensities that transcend all rational interpretation and the possibility of constituting a unified subject. Brecht connects them in the name of assumed revolutionary goals, but literary egalitarianism or anarchism prevents the full conversion of sensual intensities into a pedagogical process (ETP 568). Therefore, in the next step, Brecht reaches for overtly parenetic forms that demystify the realities of power and capital, illustrate the mechanisms of class struggle, and incite to battle. In the end, Brecht abandons the “power of refusal” described by Althusser and serves us a clear message: it is the “greedy” who build a false consciousness of the hungry, the great of this world who deny the simple man the right to rule, and so on. This is what Didi-​Huberman writes about when he examines the transition from “taking position” (prendre position) to “taking side” (prendre parti). Rancière is interested in the risks involved in the innovative form. He argues that even in the passages in which Brecht refrains from explicit lecturing, he remains trapped by the formula of engaged art. Brecht’s project of awakening political consciousness is nullified by the unleashed game of contradictions. To put it in yet another way, Brecht operates in the aesthetic regime, this universe of mute and wandering letter, meaning a sign without a legitimate interpretation or a defined addressee. He constructs his elaborate project of literature that is supposed to mobilize and revolt, but he encounters the phenomenon of indeterminacy; after all, the aesthetic regime refers to “to the suspension of a determinable relation between the artist’s intention, a performance in some place reserved for art, and the spectator’s gaze and state of the community” (DOP 137). Once again, we come across the paradox to which Rancière returns so eagerly:  the emancipatory potential of art and literature is based on the

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reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible, which is done by the individual recipient, so an oeuvre that is “pure” has more power to change the world than the one that calls to fight. In The Emancipated Spectator, this reflection takes the form of a “paradox of the spectator,” to paraphrase the title of a famous work by Diderot.559 Contemporary theater attempts to lead the spectator out of a passive and contemplative position, restoring to her the powers of independent thought and action, and it does so by abolishing (Artaud) or maximizing distance (Brecht). However, these innovative devices are part of the logic of pedagogical practices based on the one-​way transmission of knowledge, and as a result, they make the spectator mindless. The mindlessness (l’abrutissement) results from the separation of subjects based on their capacities: as active versus passive or more versus less knowledgeable. Unsurprisingly, much of the conceptual and theoretical effort of theatrical innovators goes in this direction to establish an “identity between cause and effect” (ES 14), namely of intention and reception, of message content and its decryption. To think of emancipation through art and literature, we must allow for the existence of this anarchic element that situates itself on the viewer’s side: It is in this power of associating and dissociating that the emancipation of the spectator consists –​that is to say, the emancipation of each of us as spectator. Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and know, as spectators who all the time link what we see to what we have seen and said, done and dreamed (ES 17).

The use that the spectator makes of a performance (or the reader of a book) escapes all control, and it cannot be reconciled either with the intention of the creator or with any legitimate exegesis. This is the risky shift that Rancière proposes: emancipation is a strictly individual process spent on contingency, so its model subject is the ignorant schoolmaster or the ordinary spectator/​reader, who is a partner in the distribution of the sensible. ***

559 According to Diderot’s essay Paradox of the Actor, the paradoxical position of the actor boils down to the duplicated obligation under which she operates: to the author’s original idea and the figure of the played character –​and to the audience. To persuade the latter to engage emotionally, she must not relive her role but pretend to embody the character, because it is another thing to be emotional, another to be moved. The paradox of the spectator is similarly structured, based on the contradiction between two imperatives: passive reconstruction of the scenario designed by the author/​director and the active, free action mediated by aesthetic experience.

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Like Foucault, Rancière attempts to betray “discursive police” and find conditions of emancipatory politics. He generally focuses on cases that do not fit into the epochal frame –​be it epistemic or discursive –​on aberrations that transcend the modes of truth. Therefore, he believes not in engaged art, which is supposed to help the audience understand social problems and inspire them to repair the world. He views revolutionary ideas of influence through art in the type of epic theater as projects of self-​mediation that –​contrary to the intentions of their creators –​fit a pedagogical logic. It is the schoolmaster who bridges the gap between his knowledge and the ignorance of his pupil, who reduces “the distance on the condition that he constantly re-​creates it” (ES 8). The aberrations in question –​the verbal excesses, illegitimate identifications, projects of poetic and political imagination –​are related to the regime of écriture, the excess of poetry, and the deluge of paperasse. The poetics of knowledge reconstructs the literary procedures by which scientific discourse distinguishes itself from literature, while attempting to grasp the link between these disorders and irregularities and literature as the art of unformed speech. As we know, Foucault also looks for similar signs of deregulation in literary works: a break with representation (in which language appears as a transparent system of signs binding the signifier with the signified) and with the principle of “expression” (expressing independent, internal contents), the principle of establishing a new relation between words and things; a break with the primacy of the speaking subject and the gradual restoration of language’s sovereignty. We may see the beginnings of this process already in Cervantes’s novel,560 albeit Foucault devotes most attention to works of late modernity by Mallarmé, Roussel, Blanchot, or Artaud, which rehabilitate various forms of “excluded language” developing on the border of the forbidden and the impossible. Foucault studies deliberate linguistic errors and linguistically correct but culturally unacceptable utterances, he studies blasphemous texts that boldly enter taboo spheres (magical, religious, sexual), and the works that employ “structurally esoteric” language that communicates through concealing.561 Foucault argues that unlike other social practices  –​economic, medical, or legal  –​that seek their rationalization and

560 M.  Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London and New York: Routledge 2002, p. 54: “Language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature.” 561 M. Foucault, “Szaleństwo, nieobecność dzieła,” trans. T. Komendant, in: Szaleństwo i literatura, p. 156.

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justification by reference to the discourse of truth, literature repeatedly asks the excluded, against the socially established truth. This is not the case in Rancière’s The Politics of Literature, The Flesh of Words, or Mute Speech. If literature testifies to something important for the community, it is not by being a vehicle of otherness and an instrument of transgression, but by way of introducing heteronomy into the self. By superimposing itself on the calculus of a part of society, texts bring to life bodiless beings.562 Rancière is more interested in the poetics of reception and speaks about the realizing of the word, about the word becoming a body (prendre corps). Literary texts draw maps of visibility, new trajectories between the visible and the expressible, and connections between ways of being, acting, and speaking. They modify perception and customs, the rules of our belonging and destroy the functionality of gestures and rhythms adapted to cycles of production, reproduction, and obedience. Thus, literature is quasi-​flesh: blocks of statements circulating without a legitimate father or addressee. Literature does not produce a collective body; on the contrary, it introduces fault lines into collective imaginaries and develops the potential for disembodiment (désincorporation). Literature changes the collective sensorium by calling into question the distribution of roles and territories. It is the first language, in which equality expresses itself, and it is the first movement of “exercises in freedom.”

562 J. Rancière, “L’inadmissible,” Le Genre humain 1.29/​1995, p. 183.

V Exercises in Freedom The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those that were still standing, also two-​dimensional, with a lateral shading of the trunk to suggest roundness, barely held on with their branches to the ripping mesh of the sky. Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

The Ignorant Schoolmaster The story begins in 1818, when Joseph Jacotot, a literature teacher, is forced to leave France because of his revolutionary past. He goes to Louvain in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (today Belgium), where he takes a job as a schoolmaster. The problem is that he finds himself in a classroom with students who do not speak French, while he himself speaks no Flemish. Realizing that traditional teaching methods will not work, he invents the idea of using a bilingual edition of The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. He instructs the students to read Fénelon’s work and to juxtapose whole sentences in the two language versions. He does not explain spelling or conjugation but simply asks them to find the French equivalents of words they know and combine them into new phrases. The experiment brings excellent results: after some time, all the students are fluent in French. This intuitive action leads Jacotot to a trail of discovery:  understanding is translation, the production of an equivalent of the text. The text does not have a “hidden meaning,” there is no language-​master, no language to end all languages, in which the ultimate meaning of the words we read can be articulated. To learn and to understand are two pseudonyms for the same act: translation.563 After all, 563 Moreover, we may consider translation a model form of political action. E. Méchoulan, “Jacques Rancière in the Forest of Signs: Indiscipline, Figurality and Translation,” in: Rancière and Literature, p. 50: “The true arena of the political is the terrain

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Fénelon himself wrote by translating: lessons of politics into a legend, Homeric Greek and Virgilian Latin into his contemporary French, hundreds of other texts and fables into an erudite story. The adventures of reason become “exercises of liberty” (IS 23). There is no language of truth hidden behind the flawed language of text, there is only the endless practice of translation. First, students repeat like parrots to exercise memory, but learning by heart is also an exercise of mind and imagination. Those who defend the separation of repetition and knowledge, memory and reason, reason and imagination, want to maintain a hierarchy of minds. Let us do like the writers we read –​Jacotot says –​like Racine who memorized, translated, and rewrote the dramas of Euripides, like Bossuet who did the same with Tertullian, like Boileau with Horace, or Haydn with Bach. This discovery quickly acquires an anthropological foundation. This is the natural path of reason, Jacotot says, who has entrusted himself to his own power and recognizes it in action: to encounter something new and unknown, to compare it with something known, repeat it, and try its imitation. To learn something and to relate everything else to it by following the maxim:  “take, read, compare.” After all, everyone has some crumbs of knowledge to which they can relate what is at first new and incomprehensible. The fragments combine but do not integrate. The work of intellect is independent of individual aptitude:  the latter functions as a handy justification for impotence. The primary thing is to trust the law of careful reading and speaking, which becomes law when we expose two fundamental lies: “I am telling the truth” and ”I cannot say.” The former stops the movement of thought while the latter restrains will (IS 57). Rancière adds elsewhere: “There are two great sins against emancipation. The first one is to say: I cannot. The other one is to say: I know.”564 Jacotot’s idea is a bomb planted under the teaching system. We unreflectively take for granted that a schoolmaster’s job is to transfer knowledge, form minds, and lead students from the simple to the complex. However, the logic of explication is based on a Platonic hierarchy: above the dead letter of the book, this logic positions the living (spoken) word of the schoolmaster, which inhibits the

of translation. Who is in charge of translations and who decides what sentences are deemed untranslatable delimits systems of power. The people in power fear all these words circulating in the social space, because one can never know exactly where they will end up, and how they will be interpreted and recycled.” 564 J. Rancière, “La Méthode de l’égalité,” in: La Philosophie déplacée, p. 523. Fr. “Il y a deux grands péchés contre l’émancipation. Le premier est de dire: je ne peux pas. Le second est de dire: je sais.”

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work of translation (IS 38). The schoolmaster prevents the potential regress into infinity. Doubling reasons stops at an arbitrary point, marked as legitimate interpretation. To explain means above all to show the student that she cannot understand something on her own. Explanation is the central pedagogical myth, the parabola of a world divided into minds that are enlightened and unenlightened, mature and immature, capable and incapable, intelligent and stupid, superior and inferior. Explanation creates the gulf between the wisdom of scholars and the ignorance of the poor:  the young people, those wandering blindly in the maze of knowledge, and the simpletons whose ignorance resembles childish helplessness. The keyword “to understand” destroys the self-​trust of reason, introducing a dualistic order: to understand means to understand that nothing can be understood without an explanation and submission to an immovable hierarchy of minds (IS 6-​8). The logic of explication must be reversed. Explanation is not a necessary mediation between impossibility and understanding; on the contrary, this impossibility is a necessary fiction that structures the explicative system. It is the schoolmaster who needs impossibility, not the other way around. Education should be transformed into teaching understood as a common practice of equality. To do so, we must “understand understanding:” not as a power of unveiling, of tearing away veils of ignorance from the subject, but as the power of translation that confronts speaking beings, allowing the ignorant to possess the secret of the “mute” book. Moreover, we must assume the preestablished equality of intelligence and that its only limiting factor is the fluctuation of will.565 The Ignorant Schoolmaster is an unusual book in Rancière’s oeuvre, because it is a “philosophical fable.”566 The book soon turned out to be scandalous, arousing indignation both among defenders of the pedagogical system and among its reformers. This is hardly surprising, because its critical force is directed both against the conservative vision of school and its progressive vision. Rancière states that they “both start with inequality and end up with inequality.” Besides, 565 See critique of this opposition: G. Verstraete, “Les Dynamiques émancipatrices et abrutissantes de l’égalité des intelligences et de l’égalité des volontés,” in: Figures du “Maître ignorant,” pp.  65–​78. 566 Davis, Jacques Rancière, p. 28, calls this book a “philosophical fable,” for here Rancière abandons analysis, dissection, and discussion to make extensive use of the “ventriloquist effect.” He dramatizes the conflict between the New Method and the Old Method (known simply as La Vieille) by combining historical reconstructions, evocations, emphatic tirades, and visions of a new, better world with ironic pastiches of ancien régime’s defenders.

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the progressive option is lined with its opposite, which means it builds “nihilistic interpretation of the argument of suspicion” (OS 54). The most spectacular example of this type of nihilist-​sanative action remains Bourdieu’s idea of reproduction and its supplementary reform projects. The idea stems from two surveys conducted by Bourdieu with Jean-​Claude Passeron in 1962–​1963. They used the collected data to formulate a general, universalizing theory. The basic thesis is that a student’s educational opportunities greatly depend on the match between her habitus and the habitus required by the educational system, meaning the habitus of the dominant class. Thus, the education that supposedly eliminates social inequalities serves to recreate a stable system of role distribution, reinforcing the traditional non-​egalitarian distribution of cultural and symbolic capital. Once again, a familiar mechanism operates here, which Bourdieu encapsulates in the chiasmatic figure of the simultaneous internalization of externality and externalization of internality. Habitus structures practices and generates objective regularities of behavior, which in turn, become parts of objective structures to be then incorporated by individuals. The school reinforces this mechanism as a place of instilling a legitimate culture (culture légitime). Pedagogical action imposes the power of dominant cultural arbitrariness by masking its class origins. Through ritualization and routinization, it turns arbitrariness into necessity, thus encouraging the reproduction of the balance of power underlying this arbitrariness. Pedagogical action instils pre-​reflective assumptions, producing automatic conformity between objective and cognitive structures. Importantly, the reproduction of cultural privilege and deprivation is supported by a fiction of equality that reduces cultural (and, ultimately, class-​related) differences to natural predispositions, talents, and limitations. In short, school leads the children of the people to believe that it gives them equal opportunities and that success or failure depends on individual talents rather than on social conditioning, later trying to introduce the children to a world of knowledge and aesthetic visions inaccessible to the dominated, so that they see for themselves that it is “not for them” and accept their social location. The scholastic disposition naturalizes the distance from practical and material matters and from physical labor –​the distance that underlies the habitus of the dominant classes. The school system excludes the poor by reinforcing among them a sense of alienation from the world of knowledge and art. Bourdieu and Passeron’s The Inheritors (1964) ends with a cautiously optimistic conclusion: Any real democratization [of the school system] presupposes that the most disadvantaged are taught where they can acquire teaching, namely at school; that to broaden the

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field of what can be rationally and technically acquired by methodical training must come at the expense of what is irreducibly left to the chance of individual talent, which in fact means: to the logic of social privilege.567

The Inheritors discusses not only the eponymous inheritors but also the miraculous children (les miraculés):  the daughters of peasants and workers who make unexpected careers. In Reproduction written six years later, these reformist accents are muted. The defeatist antinomy of domination contributes to this: when the dominated opposes the system, she excludes herself from it, thus confirming her status as the dominated. However, above all, we observe the effect of an ideal system without an alternative, which contributes toward persuading each social subject to stay in the place which falls to him by nature. … This privileged instrument of the bourgeois sociodicy which confers on the privileged the supreme privilege of not seeing themselves as privileged manages the more easily to convince the disinherited that they owe their scholastic and social destiny to their lack of gifts or merits, because in matters of culture absolute dispossession excludes awareness of being dispossessed.568

According to Bourdieu, the politics of education comes full circle with the relentless conversion of socioeconomic capital into symbolic capital. Pedagogical action is a symbolic violence that conceals a preference for a certain way of being, thinking, and feeling –​consistent with the habitus of the bourgeoisie. This symbolic violence functions all the better the more effectively it conceals its function and the power relations underlying the system. In other words, the effectiveness of reproduction is guaranteed by empty egalitarian slogans of formal equality and progressive democratization. They generate the trompe-​l’œil effect and blind us to the reproduction of inequality. This argument is based on an elementary syllogism of suspicion. Here appears a disagreement between the greater premise (the promise of equality contained in legal declarations) and the lesser premise (the practice of inequality illustrated by the failures of working-​class children). The school cannot deliver on the promise of equality because of its own symbolic logic. The perpetuation

567 P.  Bourdieu, J.-​C.  Passeron, Les Héritiers, Paris: Editions de Minuit 1964, p. 111. Fr. “Toute démocratisation réelle suppose donc qu’on les enseigne là où les plus défavorisés peuvent les acquérir, c’est-​à-​dire à l’Ecole; que l’on élargisse le domaine de ce qui peut être rationnellement et techniquement acquis par un apprentissage méthodique aux dépens de ce qui est abandonné irréductiblement au hasard des talents individuels, c’est-​à-​dire en fait, à la logique des privilèges sociaux.” 568 Bourdieu, Passeron, Reproduction, p. 210.

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of inequality receives succor by the preaching of equality: most claim that the school system only evaluates individual abilities. This reinforces the belief that children from poor environments are less gifted. Then, the egalitarian promise is not just a cover, but an active support of the reproduction processes. The essence of school agrees with the etymology of its name, Greek σχολή, which on the deepest level connects school to the condition of those people who have free time.569 Therefore, egalitarian slogans reinforce an ancient Platonic superstition: working people have no time to think and act in public spaces. We can disarm this syllogism in various ways. We can point to unauthorized generalizations and lack of nuance (as Raymond Boudon)570 or to the neglect of the empirical data that falsify theoretical assumptions (as Rancière in OS 40). We can argue about the precise interpretation of certain phenomena. For example, Rancière evokes another aspect of the school’s separation from the rest of social space, as indicated by the ancient Greek original meaning of school as “rest, idleness:” it is a reconfiguration of space and time that shatters the division by which certain forms of knowledge and activities are exclusive to certain groups, thus extends aristocratic privileges and democratizing leisure. Moreover, we can identify the implicit purpose that accompanies all suspicious syllogisms. The mechanics of the argument is based on the play of oppositions: the system reproduces its existence because it is unrecognized; or, by reproducing its own existence, the system generates the effect of unrecognition. Therefore, habitus reproduces itself imperceptibly and everyone minds “their own business:” quilting shoes or composing sonnets. However, “one’s own business” also remains the sociologist’s concern. In The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière mocks: “for the social machine thus regulated is ever only the developed form of the axiom allowing sociology to exist as a science, ensuring that its object will never teach itself ” (PhP 178). However, the argument of praxis remains key. Jacotot’s risky pedagogical experiment removes the specter of didactics as a forced mechanical assimilation of knowledge and patterns of behavior, setting in motion a circulation of knowledge

569 P.  Hallward, Jacques Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery, in: Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics, pp.  31–​32. 570 Boudon argues that the inequality of opportunity is linked not to habitus but to the cycle of decisions made successively by the student and her family, among the lower classes linked to misjudgments: underestimating the benefits of education and overestimating the costs of its acquisition. R. Boudon, L’Inégalité des chances, Paris: A. Colin 1973.

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and experience, which in a model way links four basic areas of education –​to use Jerome Bruner’s typology –​of agency (managing one’s own mental activity), reflection (learning with understanding), collaboration (sharing knowledge), and culture (negotiating and institutionalizing the way of living and thinking).571 The revolutionary idea consists primarily in the elimination of the traditional figure of teacher as the master, lord, and ruler (the French maître means “master,” but also “ruler, owner, superior”). The schoolmaster becomes ignorant, meaning not the possessor of knowledge she intends to transfer but the initiator of a shared adventure in the domain of skills, experience, and imagination. She becomes ignorant by virtue of an explicative assumption, according to the formula that Jacotot includes in the program of l’enseignement universel:  “I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you.”572 It is a challenging and liberating formula. Following this formula, Jacotot began to teach subjects in which he was completely incompetent like painting and piano. His role was to emancipate students and embolden them to use their reason. An ignorant student will acquire knowledge that his teacher does not have if the latter obliges the former to use her abilities. A circle of power (cercle de la puissance) will appear, homologous to the circle of powerlessness in the old explicative method (IS 15–​16). This second circuit exists in petrified form in the school system and in the entire social order. To break the circulation of ignorance, we should make this first emancipatory gesture. Jacotot had no teaching method. He preached the good news that was to shake the Republic of Knowledge in its foundations. This will happen when the people discover that everything human is within their reach, that every ignorant person can be the schoolmaster for another ignorant person. This good news announces the beginning of universal education subject to the overriding axiom that there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacities, only differences in their manifestations (IS 17). However, at the time of Jacotot, the Enlightenment narrative only reinforced the pedagogical relation by saying that all, even the poor, can gain knowledge and learn the truth, become aware of right and wrong, of God and justice. However, above this equality, the Enlightenment narrative superimposed the idea of the inequality of minds, repeating that the people are a herd that needs a shepherd. Can Bildung be entrusted to just anyone? Of course not, we must educate a

571 See J. Bruner, The Culture of Education, Cambridge:  Harvard University Press 1996, p. 87. 572 M. Jacotot, Sommaire des leçons publiques de M. Jacotot sur les principes de l’enseignement universel, published by J. S. Van de Weyer, Bruxelles 1822, p. 11 (IS 15).

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class of educators, a community of scholars. That creates a closed circle: the enlightened want to enlighten those immersed in ignorance to free them from obscurantism with the help of increasingly rational methods and explanations, but as a result, they reinforce divisions, thicken the demarcation line separating the two types of humanity, and unintentionally improve methods of fooling (IS 121). The paradox is that to put equality as a goal is in fact generating distance, which the very operation of reducing distance reproduces indefinitely: “Whoever starts from inequality is sure to find it at the end”.573 Inequality transforms into an explanatory and perfectly self-​serving fiction that justifies the existence of the entire fooling system. The victory of the progressives over the old method simultaneously means the victory of the old method through its own opposite, “the absolute triumph of institutionalized inequality, the exemplary rationalization of that institution” (IS120). Jacotot warned of the impossible combination of contradictory logics: the elite logic essentially contained in the speech act and the non-​egalitarian logic that is the essence of social bonding. He refused to translate his emancipatory idea into any pedagogical idea. He remained alone and profoundly misunderstood. He died with “knowledge of the equality of reasonable beings buried under the fiction of progress” (IS 134). The Ignorant Schoolmaster is meant to protect us from this despair. Rancière takes up Jacotot’s critique and diagnoses the error of the initial premise. He formulates a declaration of faith in a community of equals that can materialize under a threefold condition. First, the community should not be a goal but an assumption. Second, this assumption must be continually renewed through action. Third, this community cannot materialize in the form of any social institution. Let us briefly consider these three assumptions.

Performative of Equality Equality is no longer a goal to be achieved but a starting point or assumption that must be sustained at all costs. Jacotot reversed the Cartesian cogito ergo sum by saying: “I am human, therefore I think.”574 This seemingly straightforward reversal founds no essentialist calculus based on hard anthropological data –​it is a performative. The proclamation “equality of all speaking beings” (IS 39) reverses the social fate. The source of the people’s obliviousness is not the lack of education but the belief in mental inferiority, a distant analogy of which are other such 573 J. Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris 2007, p. XI. Fr. “Qui part de l’inégalité est sûr de la retrouver à l’arrivée.” 574 Jacotot, Sommaire des leçons, p. 23 (IS 36).

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pre-​statutory judgments, like that women’s minds remain incapable of grasping sophisticated reasoning. The assumed equality has primarily an operational value: “Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition. And for this, it’s enough for us that the opinion be possible” (IS 46). This assumption resembles neither an initial axiom nor a regulative utopia, nor is it any “transcendent invariant of politics,”575 albeit we can compare it to “betting on equality” (MOE; je parie sur l’égalité).576 The arbitrary establishment of synonymy between equality and intelligence, reason and will founds individual freedom and makes democratic society possible. Importantly, as Rancière clarifies in an extended refutation, not everyone should become Newton, Spinoza, Shakespeare, or Rembrandt. The point is to educate liberated people who can say about themselves “I’m a painter too” in such a way that it does not resound with unnecessary pride but with the power of a rational being (IS 67). Self-​Confirmation. Equality does not have to be proven, but it must be practiced and verified in free action. In this respect, it resembles the “equaliberty” (égaliberté) invented by Étienne Balibar. The term implies an inseparable intertwining of equality and freedom that cannot exist without each other. It implies two things:  unlimited democracy not as a constitutional state system but a historical process of extending rights to all humanity; the universal right to politics, meaning anyone can become a political subject.577 Rancière argues in a similar vein. The performative of equality devoid of any theoretical guarantees presupposes an elementary freedom-​in-​equality of all speaking beings. Increased freedom results in increased equality and vice versa.578 Nevertheless, the decisive formal element of this arrangement remains equality. Why formal? It is not that people desire equality –​Rancière argues with Axel Honneth –​nor that politics is based on this desire, but that the definition of politics includes equality, meaning that as a presupposition, it implies a break

575 Birnbaum, Egalité radicale, p. 22. Fr. “Un transcendantal invariant de la politique.” 576 Rancière, La méthode de l’égalité, p. 163. 577 E.  Balibar, Equaliberty, trans. J. Ingram, Durham:  Duke University Press 2014, pp.  35–​65. 578 B. Bolman, T. Hodgman, “Can We (Still) Be Žižekians and Rancièreans?,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 5.3/​2016.

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with inequality.579 Unlike freedom, equality remains pointless. As Dilip Gaonkar writes: Unlike liberty equality has no “ends,” no arrivals, no progressive emancipatory grand narratives in which it can play the protagonist. Equality is a point of departure, a volatile spread one traverses laterally from one encounter to the next, gathering nuances and differences in variable circumstances and across heterogeneous situations.580

Meanwhile, inequality has no right, so it rationalizes itself by multiplying explanatory fictions. A community of equals does not use this kind of legitimation, instead demanding constant realization –​under two conditions: (1) “it is not a goal to be reached but a supposition to be posited from the outset and endlessly reposited;” (2) “the community of equals can never achieve substantial form as a social institution. It is tied to the act of its own verification, which is forever in need of reiteration” (OS 83–​84). Therefore, we must dismiss the fantasy of Unity and come to terms with the individuality of emancipatory processes. Individuality. The teaching in question is based on negation: it primarily entails “learning how to unlearn” (“apprendre a dèsapprendre”), to dismantle the explanatory system that structures the field of experience. Such teaching aspires to develop inventive methods of anti-​explication (des-​explication), which cannot become the basis of any institutional project.581 Jacotot argues that no system can guarantee equality. Even more so: every institutionalization of equality is a betrayal of this intellectual and moral adventure. In this sense, public teaching is the work of mourning for emancipation. Equality appears and disappears, it is found and lost in the individual effort (IS 62). It is not given to us and cannot be inflicted on us. It is difficult to agree with commentators who place this concept in a purely insurrectionary model of emancipation.582 In this reflection, it is not at all the renewal of anarchic opposition or the conception of a future egalitarian utopia that is at stake, because equality does not own any social institutions but inscribes itself inside its opposite. Its work happens in the institutions and machines that are its opposite. As Bernard Aspe puts it:  “The politics of

579 A. Honneth, J. Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement: Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, New York: Columbia University Press 2016, pp. 73, 112, 115. 580 D. Gaonkar, “A Preface to Rancière,” in: Distributions of the Sensible, p. viii. 581 J. Rancière, “La dés-​expliaction,” Europe 1097–​1098/​2020, pp.  6–​13. 582 T.  May, Contemporary Political Movements, pp. 128–​132; P. Cingolani, “Philosophie en mouvements,” in: La Philosophie déplacée, pp.  395–​410.

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emancipation has no other body than the one lent to it by the enemy. The inscription in the sociojuridical body is the space that ultimately confirms –​as far as real traces are concerned –​the community of egalitarian distribution.”583 Thus, the politics of equality holds at a distance any community body, and the “community of equals” never becomes a society but persists as a “community of distribution.” It is the simultaneity of disidentification, the unorchestrated plethora of practices that renews the egalitarian event. Rancière’s intervention in the field of pedagogy has generated a storm of commentary. Numerous critiques draw on arguments from various registries.584 Most often, they accuse Rancière of venturing into lofty abstraction; that his book would in no way inspire real reform efforts. Some called this concept a theatrocracy, arguing that today it is difficult to abandon expert knowledge, which is stems from traditional transmission. Moreover, they underline the book’s anachronism, saying that it is very ill suited to the era of universal ignorance, in which knowledge gives way to instinct, faith, feeling, contempt for detail and complexity, all under the curse of exclusivity. Some argue that this type of universal teaching would undermine the socializing function of education, foregrounding a new ignorant citizen, unfamiliar with the principles of “good citizenship.” Others emphasize that the assumption of equality finds itself today in a highly paradoxical situation, because it is capitalism that assumes the basic equality (all inequalities being its derivatives) and illustrates the ineffectiveness of the performative of equality, because as we know, de iure equality does not lead at all toward a de facto inequality. Finally, some associate Jacotot’s method with dubious voluntarism that places all chances of emancipation in proselytism that is doomed to failure. On the other hand, Rancière’s defenders585 argue that a new aesthetic configuration of authority in pedagogical practice is possible. It is intended to open

583 Aspe, Partage de la nuit, p. 21. Fr. “La politique d’émancipation n’a pour corps que celui que lui prête l’ennemi. L’inscription dans le corps juridico-​social est le seul espace ou s’atteste ultimement, en fait de traces réelles, la communauté du partage égalitaire.” 584 See P. Hallward, “Staging Equality: On Rancière’s Theatrocracy,” New Left Review 37/​ 2006, pp. 127–​129; G. Biesta, “The Ignorant Citizen: Mouffe, Rancière, and the Subject of Democratic Education,” Studies in Philosophy of Education 30.2/​2011, pp.  141–​153; A. Birnbaum, Egalité radicale, p. 87. 585 See M. B. Greco, En dialogue avec Jacques Rancière:  Une autorité émancipatrice, trans. M. Bardet, Paris: L’Harmattan 2004, pp. 215–​220; T. E. Lewis, The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire, New York–​London: Bloomsbury 2012, p. 8.

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spaces of legitimation, repeatedly reinvent authority, displace elements of knowledge, and displace participants of this process from their “proper” positions. It has been said that the concept of the ignorant schoolmaster makes it possible to think of many innovative solutions: transformative subject processes, shared and temporary intersubjective processes, provisory and redefinable spaces of encounter, questioning thinking, egalitarian dislocations, circulations of words, activation of one’s own experience. Moreover, others argue that by linking curiosity with aesthetic experience and will  –​as in Paolo Freire’s philosophy of education –​teaching becomes similar to an artistic process. Creative feedback is activated between identity and affect, subjectification and the pre-​subjective realm of emotional qualities. Without providing a detailed account of these disputes, I would like to draw attention to the most interesting yet rarely developed analogy.586 I think of Ivan Illich’s famous 1971 work Deschooling Society. Illich an Austrian philosopher, anarchist theoretician, and reformer of education argues that the educational system reproduces class and economic differences through institutional ossification, which we unreflectively accept. Illich questions all the basic principles of the modern school, namely the division into teachers acting in the role of the judge, ideologist, doctor, and “secular priest,” and students selected by age, privileging childhood as the period of education, full-​time classes, breaking knowledge into subject fields, the harmful myth of objective measurement of abilities, and so on. Illich describes school in terms taken from Toynbee as the Universal Church of our declining culture and, in Marxian terms, as a powerful industry, a machine for the alienating institutionalization of life, a universal ritual for shaping the future consumer.587 We may easily find some similarities between Illich and Rancière. For example, Illich writes: “Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets.”588 However, the play of differences seems more interesting between the two thinkers. Illich leads his critical argument toward a project of practical solutions. He envisions a mass movement beyond the walls of institutions, a widespread sharing of physical space, a general mobilization of the entire population

586 Nina Power suggests them in “Axiomatic Equality: Rancière and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Polygraph 21/​2009. 587 I.  Illich, Deschooling Society, London: Penguin Books 1973, pp. 20–​22. 588 Illich, Deschooling Society, p. 33.

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in a mission to educate free and creative individuals. Such education happens through a network of educational guides or masters who select students based on their interests. The oppressive school is replaced by a non-​institutionalized and unrestricted exchange of knowledge and skills in voluntary educational networks. Rancière does not really retreat from this kind of vision as he disallows any systemic educational solution, not even an extra-​institutional one. Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster fundamentally differs from his guide-​master in that the former operates outside the principle of authority altogether. Instead of the project of free, networked self-​education, Rancière offers another solution, seemingly conservative but in fact more radical:  to abandon the dream of an overall transformation of the system and trust in the emancipatory power that reveals itself in individual actions. The teacher and students –​like Jacotot with his pupils –​may appear a saboteurs or thieves in the system’s bosom to renew the egalitarian promise within and despite it –​ to record their actions in the form of a transforming trace.589 The educational system requires deliberate self-​conscious action to transform itself into a momentary space of emancipation; only when subjected to such a transformation can it constitute a third element in the system, along with politics and aesthetics.590 Nevertheless, the domain that is open to such practices and even defining itself through openness remains art and literature in the aesthetic regime: the domain of feeling and acting with permeable, shifting borders that belongs to everyone and to no one.

589 Let us add that this innovative, anti-​explicative character is present in the sheer narrative of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which undermines the generalized poetics of a philosophical dissertation: “Rather than explain to the reader Jacotot’s thought, Rancière places the reader in direct contact with the words of the original ignorant schoolmaster. Even when not quoting Jacotot verbatim, Rancière’s own voice appears to imitate that of Jacotot. … Rancière, one might say, shares the stage with Jacotot; he places himself on equal footing with the ignorant schoolmaster. He thus puts into practice in his formal technique the very notion of equality that his book explores conceptually.” L. Sachs, “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Intellectual Emancipation in Circular Form,” in: Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism, ed. P. M. Bray, New York-​London: Bloomsbury 2017, pp. 56–​57. 590 “Politics-​Education-​Aesthetics:  this is Rancière’s own, utterly atheistic version of Trinity.” J. Clemens, “Rancière Lost: On John Milton and Aesthetics,” in: Rancière and Literature, p. 81.

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Glory To Thieves! In the 1976 L’Anatomie du goût,591 Bourdieu analyzes the relationship between economic and cultural capital, meaning between the social position –​to which economic positioning is related –​and the approved cultural content. Of course, he discovers exactly what he is looking for, namely regularities and correspondences: the dominant class is the creator and consumer of elite culture (distinguée), the dominated class follows the principle of amor fati and is content with popular culture, while the bourgeoisie aspires to participate in high culture, but through its unprincipled cultural ambitions, it often slips into ridiculousness or pretentiousness. According to Bordieu, the market of symbolic goods is divided into sectors. The sector of legitimate production produces art for the upper classes inscribed in the “general culture” (culture générale) sanctioned by the educational system. This art –​an extension of the school doxa –​is non-​functional and autonomous. Its proper reception is based on a purely contemplative attitude, behind which there stands the illusion of a free and altruistic love for knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. In the sector of mass or folk culture develops the artistic production that subordinates form to the communicative function, affirming the continuity between art and life. This art addresses the lower classes that worship the aesthetics of pleasure and entertainment. Finally, there is the field of limited or avant-​garde production that provides no direct pleasure. The pleasure of contact with the sophisticated form it offers is a fig leaf that hides the mechanism of social distinction as contact with experimental art allows us to confirm our high symbolic capital and belonging to the elite. The role of legitimate and limited production is also to reinforce the field’s autonomy, namely to neutralize political or economic heteronomy. This task is important because all high culture defines itself as an independent sphere of altruistic non-​functional activity. The literary field emerged in the course of the symbolic revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the surplus of people with higher education in relation to the demand for clerks and similar positions caused the appearance of the class of intellectuals and artists. The class gained autonomy in the process of rejecting economic criteria as determinants of position and replacing them with specific criteria like peer recognition.

591 P. Bourdieu, M. de Saint-​Martin, “L’Anatomie du goût,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 2.5/​October 1976; P. Bourdieu, “Le Marché des biens symboliques,” L’Année sociologique 22/​1971.

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Therefore, at the root of aesthetic values, we find a class ethos founded on ignoring the norms of utility and rejecting practicality (and, by extension, bourgeois morality). Its nomos “l’art pour l’art” is the reverse of the law of “business is business.” The ideology of art for art’s sake, which we profess in various forms to this day, turns the logic of economics upside down: symbolic victory and economic failure become opposites. Although defined in opposition to the field of economics, the artistic field is subordinated to the field of power. The games of symbolic capital that happen inside are a form of symbolic violence, to which the dominated classes must respond with a “refusal to refuse” (le refus du refus) and a withdrawal to positions of practical life. The category of taste plays key role in this case, which means that aesthetic disposition is to oppose the practical attitude. Taste enables the suspension of naive participation in art and distancing to representation, behind which stands “an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world.”592  The disposition of taste supports the mechanism of distinction and functions as a marker of belonging to a privileged group and as a criterion of exclusion: “Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary.”593 In other words, necessity is fulfilled because it suits the taste of the actors who themselves uphold the system of domination. Their disregard (méconaissance) of the mechanisms of cultural production blinds them to the struggles for recognition in which they participate and to the mechanisms of differentiation, meaning the deepening and foregrounding of the differences between the dominating and the subordinated. In fact, art and aesthetic consumption are tools for the creation of a cultural sacred, which serves a differentiating function, becoming a tool for the subtle legitimization of social difference.594 We grant an artwork an exclusive status only to “assert the (spiritual) transcendence of those who know how to recognize that transcendence.”595 By sustaining practices and tastes, the structure of domination reproduces itself endlessly. In critical analyses of this model of aesthetics, we find two types of arguments in multiple variations. The first type is methodological. It emphasizes the

592 P.  Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1984, p. 5. 593 Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 178. 594 Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 7. 595 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. xvii.

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reprehensible –​from the point of view of empirical sociology –​tendency to generalize and absolutize concepts that turn out to be perfectly incalculable, and which, hypostasized, generate a black-​and-​white view of the world. It seems untenable to assume that the aesthetics of the lower classes is a simple negation of the sublime aesthetics of the dominant classes and the complementary opposite assumption, or that the recipients of a given type of art constitute a homogenous class. Bourdieu reduces the complex universe of artistic forms and modalities, sender conventions and reception strategies to a system of simple oppositions at the service of a sociological “divide and conquer.” At this point, sociology of reception makes a poker “check” and proposes a specific study of consumer behavior in the cultural domain, such as an analysis of the behavior of exhibition visitors596 or journals of individual readers.597 Consequently, as Nathalie Heinich concisely puts it, the sociology of reception moves us above the sociology of taste, questioning not aesthetic preferences but deconstructing the very conditions allowing for the formation of a judgment in terms of “beauty” (or ugliness) or “art” (or non-​art). … What is equally important are objective properties of artworks, mental frameworks of art recipients, and pragmatic contexts of reception.598

Broadly speaking, sociology of domination projects hierarchical structures onto a complex universe of senders and recipients, in which a multiplicity of equivalent and simultaneous practices coexists undetermined (or not always/​entirely determined) by social position. This does not mean that the field of art and literature is fully sovereign. It only means that it is not absolutely determined by a structure of domination independent and prior to to this field. Empirical sociology explores this space of blurry, incomplete, conditional determination. There also appears the cultural reflection initiated by the researchers from the Birmingham School. It allows for the coexistence of ideological and

596 E. Vernon, M. Levasseur, Ethnographie de l’exposition; l’espace, le corps et le sens, Paris; Éditions du Centre Pompidou 1983; J.-​C. Passeron, E. Pedler, Le Temps donné aux tabelaux, Lyon: ENS Éditions 1991. 597 G. Mauger, C. Poliak, B. Pudal, Histoires des lecteurs, Paris: Nathan Université 1999. 598 N.  Heinich, La sociologie de l’art, Paris: La Découverte 2004, p. 56. Fr. “Ainsi, la sociologie de la réception remote en amont de la sociologie du gout en questionnant non pas les préférences esthétiques, mais les conditions mêmes permettant de voir émerger un jugement en termes de ‘beauté’ (ou de laideur), d’’art’ (ou de non-​art) … Tant les proproétés objectives des oeuvres que les cadres mentaux des récepteurs et que les contextes pragmatiques de réception (lieux, moments, interactions…) sont requis.”

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non-​ideological discourses –​even in a single message –​some of which produce and sustain inequalities, while others remain neutral. It presents the situational and interactional character of the construction of meaning within processes of coding and decoding, to recall the famous Stuart Hall’s theoretical suggestion, when he distinguishes three types of reception codes (dominance-​hegemonic, negotiation, opposition).599 Such studies tend to conclude that there is no necessary correlation between social position and aesthetic taste. Sometimes, they are also reinforced by the epochal diagnosis of the democratization and “postmodernization” of contemporary culture. This is the second type of arguments –​which I call evolutionary. Those who use them emphasize the anachronism of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory. For example, Bernard Lahire argues based on an extensive study of tastes and preferences that the modern “culture of individuals” (la culture des individus) opens a previously unknown space for free self-​fashioning.600 Others write about a shift from cultural duty to cultural omnivorousness (des goûts omnivores).601 We find this type of critique in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman: Bourdieu was observing a landscape illuminated by the setting sun, which momentarily sharpened contours which were soon to dissolve in the approaching twilight. He therefore captured culture at its homeostatic stage: culture at the service of the status quo, of the monotonous reproduction of society and maintenance of system equilibrium, just before the inevitable and fast approaching loss of its position.602

Emerging from a heavy, compact, and systemic modernity means, among other things, filling in the gap between high and low art, and the essential transformation of culture, which turned from a system of orders into a system of offers, which as a result no longer performs missionary tasks but merely satisfies individual consumer’s needs. The problem is that the sociology of taste seems immune to this kind of assaults. Bourdieu indicates that the “aesthetic” approach to art promoted by legitimate culture can also apply to lower culture like jazz, cinema, or comic books. It is enough if the recipient can generate an appropriate formalistic discourse or –​through interpretative play –​shows distance from the

599 S.  Hall, “Encoding/​Decoding,” in: Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–​79, eds. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, P. Willis, London: Hutchinson 1980. 600 B.  Lahire, La Culture des individus. Dissonnances culturelles et distinction de soi, Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2004. 601 R. A. Peterson, “Le Passage à des goûts omnivores: notions, faits et perspectives,” Sociologie et sociétés 36.1/​2004, pp. 145–​164. 602 Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World, p. 11.

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determinants of popular art, along the underlying necessities of life. The key is the ability to compare, contrast, and generalize unavailable to representatives of the lower classes, who move from the particular to the particular, unable to break out of the programmed reception. Cultural omnivorousness becomes a new form of distinction, setting one apart from the monogamous consumers of crime or romance fiction. Of course, Rancière does not reach for this type of argumentation. He seeks distance from the sociology of domination through the occasional critique of method and –​most often –​philosophical presuppositions. Thus, he writes that the sociologist’s primary weapon –​the questionnaire –​operates a déjà-​dit, with a pre-​established doxa that the questioned person can only actualize: “All music of quality interests me” /​“Classical music isn’t for people like us” (PhP 187). The questionnaire generates a situation of an exam, serving to test knowledge rather than examine art reception. Its opposite is experimental activity like the one proposed by Miguel-​Angel Estrella, who transported a piano on the Andean Plateau to check the perception of classical music by the local people, who are not used to art. It turned out that Debussy raises little interest among the villagers, Mozart allows them to establish basic relationship, and Bach inspires their enthusiasm. Such an experiment serves to protect art from “sociological banalization” (PhP 185). However, Rancière’s primary task is to revise the assumptions that support the sociology of domination, capture the matter in sociological methodology, and expose its non-​recognition. Of course, Bourdieu’s reasoning has an anti-​Kantian edge. For Bordieu, the independence of aesthetic judgment is the quintessence of philosophical illusion, which conceals the brutal reality of domination. The mirages of aesthetic freedom are part of symbolic violence, immobilizing the dominated in their proper place. However, as commentators easily notice,603 Kant appears in Bourdieu’s works merely a pretext. His reflections focus not on reevaluating Kant’s concept of the power of judgment but on proclaiming the truth despite the disavowed thinker. The specific reading of Kant leaves no room for dialog as it is merely a starting point for principled distinctions between truth and falsity, illusion and reality, effect and cause, the secondary and the primary. Investigation, verification, and denunciation are the basic laws of reasoning. Michel de Certeau writes that we observe here an attack of “dogmatic reason” on sociological and ethnographic data. What comes to fruition in this approach is

603 K. Geldof, “Autorité, lecture et réflexivité: Pierre Bourdieu et le jugement esthétique de Kant,” Littérature 98.2/​1995, pp.  97–​124.

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the devious rhetoric practice subject to a well-​known recipe for theory: cut out and rework.604 Bourdieu’s Distinction is the exact opposite of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Bourdieu argues there is one taste in cases when Kant differentiates it, namely when the latter distinguishes between aesthetic pleasure arising from a judgment of beauty and that associated with drinking wine. Elsewhere, Bourdieu argues taste varies at points when Kant sees just one taste common to all: judgment of taste’s formal universality breaks down into class-​conditioned taste of freedom and taste of necessity. This reversal –​or reworking of what was previously cut out –​serves the argument that the judgment of taste’s independence is a veil concealing the true face of aesthetics as a subsystem of social distinction. Aesthetic difference “thus turned out to be a mere sublimation and concealment of social difference” (FPA 15). The work of critical thought becomes counterproductive, for it serves only to reiterate Plato’s injunction: All must keep to their position! This apparent movement, which leads to the discovery of an original stillness, is juxtaposed by Rancière with a careful insight into the actual dynamics of aisthesis. Aisthesis is a specific mode of experiencing, which has existed for about two centuries and in which we perceive certain objects as artworks. It is not a term that describes the “reception” of specific artworks but the “matter of the sensible fabric of experience within which (works of art) are produced” (A x). What defines this sphere of experience is material circumstances like places of performances and exhibitions, forms of circulation and reproduction, along with modes of perception, regimes of emotions, descriptive categories, and classifying and interpreting thought patterns. These are all necessary conditions for us to perceive words, forms, sounds, and movements as art. The domain of aisthesis is blurrily separated from the sphere of other experiences –​blurrily because the border is constantly negotiated  –​and yet open to all. As Terry Eagleton argues, the autonomy of modern art has not been employed to do concrete police work: it produces a model of bourgeois individualism, internalizes it, and transforms it into subjectivity, turning external coercion into “tact or know-​how, intuitive good sense or inbred decorum,”605 thus constituting an expression of middle-​class aspirations to achieve hegemony. On the contrary, autonomy is a prerequisite for the separation of aesthetic experience, which becomes a space of

604 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press 1984, p. 59. 605 T.  Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell 1990, p. 41.

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free appearance, which in turn, transforms itself into social reality by becoming the basis of uncontrolled subjectivities. The dynamics of aisthesis relies on spontaneous participation, inventive adaptations, anachronistic collages, interceptions, and reversals. Rancière sententiously states that in the city of sociologist the king, there are possessors and the dispossessed, yet there are no thieves (PhP 186). The testimonies that Rancière collected while working on The Nights of Labor prove that it was part of workers’ practice to steal words and ideas, metaphors and thoughts. Representatives of the people read and visited museums, wrote poetry and philosophized in anarchic ways. Their activity was eclectic and self-​educating.606 The people who broke into the garden of the arts and sciences to steal the forbidden fruit was no crowd of barbarians conducting a vertical invasion, but they were a community of le peuple-​artiste,607 both ordinary and exceptional, one that uses commonly circulating meanings that allow for historical and personal experiences to crystallize and escape the logic of strict causality. The stake in this practice was not the realization of exploitation, but quite the opposite, the forgetting about it and creating a new identity, undetermined by the system. Rancière transforms the history of these robberies and hostile takeovers into a philosophy of emancipation. The latter is possible only if we assume that every working person can transform into an esthete, meaning that her vision, language, and tastes are not necessarily determined by social and economic conditions. Entering these sensations and passions seemingly reserved for others liberates us from the curse of amor fati. This allodoxia is the kings road of heterodoxia (PhP 200). The logic of Plato’s superstition bankrupts if we assume that every human being thinks and speaks, and that ideas and words circulate independently of social stratification, break through police demarcation lines, and hold a subversive potential in their ability to deregulate interpersonal bonds and categorical systems. The essence of emancipation does not reside in unification but declassification, in tearing apart existing orders and replacing them with controversial figures of division. Words gain their power not in the act of “describing” but in naming as if to test, by intriguing and seducing. In this way, they sever the

606 D. Colson, “Eclectisme et la dimension autodidacte de l’anarchisme ouvrier,” in: Figures du “Maître ignorant,” pp.  371–​404. 607 I juxtapose Ortega y Gasset’s fearful and contemptuous formulation with the emphatic title of Maria Ivens’s book. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt Of The Masses, New York: W. W. Norton and Company 1932, p. 53, M. Ivens, Le Peuple-​artiste, cet être monstrueux : La communauté des pairs face à la communauté des génies, Paris 2002, pp. 181–​183.

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naturalness of existence, set individuals in motion, divide groups and combine them into new communities, thus bringing into being ephemeral subjects of political action, following the first thesis about politics. In his passionate critique of the sociology of domination, we recognize a gesture that Rancière repeats again and again, as he does in his confrontation with Althusser. In short, Bourdieu is reduced to the figure of the scientist. Rancière carefully erases any possible links in the field of reflection on the social role of literature and art. Indeed, reflexive sociology presents the domain of aesthetics as one of the places in which habitus is maintained, meaning where representations become regulated and patterns of action and interpretation become simultaneously homogenized, universalized, and particularized. However, works of art and literature do more than just harmonize systems of disposition in social sectors with similar conditions of existence. They can also become vehicles of doubt, question sociodicy, as well as redefine the terms that legitimate the common world, guarantee its permanence, and apparent harmony. Sometimes literature introduces crisis to the principle of legality and regularity by staging –​in accordance with the “Don Quixote effect”608 –​the tragic or comic incompatibility of individual dispositions with the social field or collective expectations. It allows us to gain distance from illusio: Indeed, one only has to suspend the commitment to the game that is implied in the feel for the game in order to reduce the world, and the actions performed in it, to absurdity, and to bring up questions about the meaning of the world and existence which people never ask when they are caught up in the game -​the questions of an aesthete trapped in the instant, or an idle spectator. This is exactly the effect produced by the novel when, aiming to be a mirror, pure contemplation, it breaks down action into a series of snapshots, destroying the design, the intention, which, like the thread of discourse, would unify the representation, and reduces the acts and the actors to absurdity, like the dancers observed silently gesticulating behind a glass door in one of Virginia Woolf ’s novels.609

For a brief moment, literature lifts us above the assumptions and unthought presuppositions produced and reproduced by the game, and then the social field appears to us in all its truth: as an arbitrary and artificial construct. This is where the possible similarities between Bourdieu and Rancière end. Let us note that the emancipatory work of the word is reduced here to the enlightenment process, which is well reflected in the vocabulary of this reflection,

608 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 160. 609 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp.  66–​67.

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dominated by metaphors of revealing oneself, gaining consciousness, and leaving ignorance behind. This is the fundamental difference between the sociologist’s and the philosopher’s understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The philosopher argues that literature in the aesthetic regime does not bring a revelation of the arbitrary social order but introduces into it a new division, tearing apart the fiction of the common world as a given and natural space of coexistence. Literature provides not the revelation of reality as a social artifact –​this petrified construction in which everyone is fixated to their position –​but it activates the play of differences and the dynamics of privatizing the universal. As such, literature situates itself in the middle of the aesthetic-​ political continuum, inhabited by the literary animal called human.

A Literary Animal To capture the key difference between Rancière and Bourdieu’s thought, Charlotte Nordmann writes: “There is something intolerable for Rancière in the idea that individuals’ capacities are determined by their social position. All men are “speaking beings,” all are “equally likely” to be touched by political statements or literary texts, to be torn by this encounter from “their natural destination.”610 Nordmann paraphrases a famous maxim that appears in The Politics of Aesthetics: “Man is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his natural purpose by the power of words” (POA 35). As obvious as this sentence may seem in the context of the whole argument, it still demands some commentary. Antideterminism. Rancière repeatedly argues that the interweaving of words determines the lives of the speaking beings as much or even more than their social position, the nature of their work, or their pay (NoH 96). However, the quoted sentence contains the problematic formula of “natural purpose.” Jean-​ Luc Nancy notices it and asks himself whether this “natural purpose” does not refer to something external or prior to “political animalism” (an antipolitics or undivided arché)? Nature is emphasized by italics in Rancière’s text so that it appears as “fiction,” but why can it not be one of the distributions of the sensible?

610 Nordmann, Bourdieu/​Rancière, p. 14. Fr. “Il y a quelque chose d’intolérable pour Rancière dans l’idée que les capacités des individus puissent être déterminées par leur position sociale. Tous les hommes sont des ‘êtres parlants,’ tous sont ‘également susceptibles’ d’être touches par des énoncés politiques ou des textes littéraires, d’être arrachés par cette rencontre a ‘leur destination naturelle.’”

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Could it be that there is an archipolitical naturalness? Or maybe it is just pure heterogeneity and externality established by political philosophy?611 I believe that in this context, natural means as much as “naturalized” and thus considered natural, as indicated by the emphasis. Thus, nature would be a forgetting of arbitrariness and proneness to change, or another name for the police. Rancière’s reflection remains deeply historicized, and this sententious statement about the “literary animal” in fact refers to the “modern” people who live in a world that lacks a strong communal foundation, which as forms of subjectification offers not embodiments or identifications but intervals between names and impossible identifications. “Political animalism” becomes a fact in an age in which words and actions create co-​being, and the relationship between the order of words and the order of bodies that determine the individual’s position is disrupted by the circulation of wandering wordings (des énoncés voyageurs) addressed to everyone and to no one. In this world of fragile ontology, in this age of lost nature, the subject exists in a weak way (peu d’être),612 and yet –​ or perhaps precisely because of this –​it speaks, it speaks a lot, despite the deception of words. Inadequacy. “The power of words” does not mean that they infallibly get to the “heart of the matter;” quite on the contrary: all linguistic representation is inadequate. However, this is not an obstacle to be removed but a precondition for the aesthetics of politics (and the politics of aesthetics):  “The democratic man is a being who speaks, which is also to say a poetic being, a being capable of embracing a distance between words and things which is not deception, not trickery, but humanity; a being capable of embracing the unreality of representation” (OS 51). Humans as “poetic beings” live immersed in an excess of words –​compared to things that could be named –​in a plethora of imprecise symbols that generate the effect of semantic scintillation. The irremovable separation of words and things and the permanent linguistic excess open a space for political action. As Benjamin Arditi argues: If the relationship between names and bodies was necessary instead of arbitrary there would be no point in trying to challenge racist, patriarchal, or heterocentrist settings by

611 J.-​L. Nancy, “Jacques Rancière et la métaphysique,” in:  La Philosophie déplacée, pp.  157–​160. 612 Rancière, La poétique du savoir.

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linking black, female, or gay bodies with the name of equality. The rejection of the naturalness of subordination creates an opening for equality.613

Literature brings the experience of a radical non-​concodance of words and things (ME 115), so in its elemental form of “literariness” (litérarité), it is an inherent element of politics. At the same time, contrary to political action, literature’s work is not based on the constitution of we but on the requalification of this, namely collective matter of perception (ETP 431). Literatuce has something scandalous about it, because it stages the impermanence and conventionality of all arrangements and categorizations. It is no coincidence that one of the epic characters of our times is the story of the new Ulysses, an anti-​hero like Don Juan, Childe Harold, or Eugene Onegin, a cunning seducer who knows that words are but words, so he cynically uses their power. The nihilist speech of the manipulator and seducer is the reverse for the dream of a language adhering to things (FW 25). Moreover, this speech imitates the heterological process that literature can initiate. Heterology. This term describes the experience of what is other and heterogeneous, along with the aporetic philosophy of otherness. Researchers of this philosophical current distinguish several tendencies: inquiries aimed at giving voice to the Wholly Other (Tout Autre), which goes beyond the relationship with the Same, not being its exact opposite (Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze); the philosophy of transgression attempting to establish a non-​ substantial understanding of being as the unknown, the other (Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot); and deconstructive projects of situating the Other in the Same (Jacques Derrida).614 Rancière reaches for the Bataillean notion of heterology to grasp with it the logic of subjectivity construction, which does not amount to a simple assertion of identity. Literary heterology operate not on the principle of positive identification (“you are this or that”) or prescriptivism (“do this or that”). It is a demonstration that presupposes the existence of the other, which it addresses, and contains an impossible identification. As such, literary heterology lies at the heart of politics: “Politics’ penchant for dialogue has much more to do with literary heterology, with its utterances stolen and tossed back at their authors and its play on the first and third persons, than with the allegedly ideal situation of dialogue between a first and a second person” (D 59).

6 13 Arditi, “Fidelity to Disagreement,” p. 57. 614 M.  Kruszelnicki, Drogi francuskiej heterologii, Wrocław 2008, pp. 133–​134.

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Thus, heterology does not fit in the skeleton of sensuality and initiates the disassembly of the sensible; it is an indirect intervention into the domain of factuality that happens through disidentification or disembodiment. Disidentification. Jean Borreil presents readers as those who find a bottle with a letter drifting in the sea: a call without a specific addressee, sent to everyone. This call acquires the status of a testimony as it testifies to the existence of an individual who accumulates life experiences, while these experiences do not belong exclusively to him but are shared; they are linguistically commonized. However, the universality of this message undergoes further subjectification in the act of reading, or as Borreil sententiously states: “De te fabula narratur: this why we read message found in a bottle.”615 Rancière captures literature’s universality and the related paradox of “non-​ subjective particularity” in a similar way. He argues that literature is the kind of historical novelty that shatters the correlation between theme and mimetic device, blurs divisions, and abolishes hierarchies, changing types of adequacies between modes of being, acting, and speaking. By doing so, Rancière abrogates the Aristotelian matrix, situating at the heart of poetry no longer fiction but a particular arrangement of linguistic signs. In this way, he brings into a common space both art and the jurisdiction of testimonies, the logic of fact and the logic of history. A specific, unique sequence of signs demands the same reading as signs written in real space. Literature’s aesthetic sovereignty opposes the reign of fiction; it institutes a unity of fictional narratives and descriptions of historical or social phenomena (POA 33). This is how literature achieves universality: by speaking uniquely about the specific, it uses common linguistic resources and inscribes its message in the space of co-​being. Literature generates “blocks of words circulating without a legitimate father who would give them to their rightful addressee,” like letters in bottles, attesting to the indissoluble intertwining of the individual and the community. Literature does not produce collective bodies but “introduces lines of fracture and disembodiment [désincorporation] into imagined collective bodies,” creating the shifting boundaries of communities, calling into question the distribution of roles, territories, and laguages (POA 36). In this sense, literature is a mediator –​or, at least, an analogon –​of the processes of political identity formation.

615 J.  Boreil, La Raison nomade, Paris: Payot 1993, p. 95. Fr. “De te fabula narratur: c’est pourquoi nous lisons le message qu’enferme la bouteille à la mer.”

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Critical readings of this concept repeatedly include an allegation that politics and aesthetics are defined in a tautological manner, too abstractly, as areas of the distribution of the sensible. According to Gabriel Rockhill, instead of concrete analysis, Rancière establishes this unity based on a philosophical fiat. Nothing would then defend this proposal against arbitrary counterproposals, namely that aesthetics is consubstantial with ethics while politics with morality; as these are also ways of distribution of the sensible.616 However, far from the “crypto-​ essentialism” of which he is accused, Rancière describes only politics and art –​ especially literature –​as instruments for the redistribution of the existing partage preserved by the police or ethical systems. This does not resemble a philosophical fiat at all but results from the adopted linguistic game: like the political act, the artistic act is an “appropriate indecorum” that assumes necessary adaptation, surprise, slip of the tongue. Both situate themselves not in an abstract exterior but inside the police distribution of the sensible –​which operates with specific ethical norms and patterns of morality –​as a response to the order of domination. Both have the same dynamics: they disassemble the social order built on a set of representational rules.617 Of course, a letter found in a bottle may carry a different message, one that contains a strong identification or a clear order. It is difficult to agree with the accusation that Rancière’s theory misses vast areas of artistic production, such as political pedagogy, which treats the work of art as a vehicle of social, moral, and ideological positions, namely as an instrument of establishing a collective frame of perception through satirical intervention, through art confirming dominant ideas, or through works projecting alternative worlds. All of this resides in the frame in which literature is a tool for the self-​interpretation of life, meaning it assumes the duty of deciphering the mute word, seeking either to confirm or transform the existing order of the sensible. However, in the latter case, literature can take the form of reformist satire, explicit critique, or programmatic utopia, which is when it gets embroiled in the insidious logic of transgressing the aesthetic regime, which often makes it miss its aim.

616 See G. Rockhill, “Rancière’s Productive Contradictions: From the Politics of Aesthetics to the Social Politicity of Artistic Practice,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 15.2/​2011, pp.  34–​37. 617 Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments, p. 42: “For Rancière decorum is the sensibility of the police.” See E. Stoneman, “Appropriate Indecorum: Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Political Theory of Jacques Rancière,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 44.2/​2011, p. 142.

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At this point, I will return to some common notions, which according to Rancière, block our thinking about literature’s emancipatory potential. Commitment It is an in-​between notion that is vacuous as an aesthetic notion and also as a political notion. It can be said that an artist is committed as a person, and possibly that he is committed by his writing, his paintings, his films, which contribute to a certain type of political struggle. An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say that his art is committed? Commitment is not a category of art. This does not mean that art is political. It means that aesthetic has its own politics, or its own meta-​politics (POA 60).

Hence, commitment refers only to the author’s attitude. Many writers in the nineteenth and (especially) in the twentieth century projected a certain connection between art and politics understood as two separate fields. These projects were based on the explicit or implicit assumption that appropriate representation could generate a new (“higher”) consciousness, which would in turn generate the imperative to act. This would happen, for example, by exposing hidden social mechanisms that arouse objection and the will to change; be it highlighting capitalism’s internal contradictions, awareness of the deep causes of economic inequality, or struggle for wealth redistribution. This kind of “political art” was to be created in opposition to the autonomous, bourgeois, and decadent “art for art’s sake,” which creates a separate, encapsulated universe. The stakes of such an undertaking shifted from the realm of sovereign artistic values to the realm of revolutionary praxis: it was no longer a matter of “writing for eternity” and creating masterpieces but of shaping the individual and collective psyche. On the other hand, by combining pedagogical elements with artistic ambiguity, intermediate forms could be represented by the already mentioned project of Brecht’s epic theater, which is the meeting point of techniques that de-​alienate art –​which was to become a tool for transforming consciousness –​and the opposite movement toward art’s autonomization.618 Rancière views such strategies as, first, based on faulty premises and, second –​ in terms of literary practice –​deceptive and risky. Let me begin with the second point, which I already elaborated above in reference to Brecht’s dramaturgy. The engaged artist tries to choose appropriate means for achieving intended goals but adjusting one to the other is problematic; impossible in fact. Sending clear messages and legible injunctions demands a single-​voice message and a

618 Which F. Jameson describes in Brecht and Method, London–​New York: Verso Books 1998, p. 45, that it develops in two directions: either dispersion, slicing into small pieces, and minimalism or the planning of megastructures.

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sender–​recipient pact. Art and literature do not meet these conditions. Even for an artwork that offers a strong “political” thesis like Jean Heartfield’s anti-​fascist photomontages (ETP 554–​555), it remains unclear where to stop the process of association and dissociation of words and images. Blocking this process at the designated point could only happen if we consider the author’s position. Otherwise, artistic technique imposes its own aesthetic politics that is incompatible with the message, as happens to editing in Heartfield’s works from the Czechoslovakian period. Any politically engaged project gravitates toward a police fixation of sense and sensory data. Roland Barthes puts it similarly in Writing Degree Zero, when he argues that writing can be political “only through an obsession with engagement,” which is when it becomes the “ethical mode of writing, in which the conscience of the scriptor … finds the comforting image of collective salvation. But just as, in the present state of History, any political mode of writing can only uphold a police world, so any intellectual mode of writing can only give rise to a para-​literature.”619 Of course, in Rancière’s terms, it is not a question of “the current stage of history” but the inherent properties of an aesthetic regime that prevents a targeted and effective influence on the recipient. Moreover, he does not introduce a principled notion of para-​literature. The contradictions of the regime generate extreme attitudes, from the deification of art’s exalted sovereignty to its total instrumentalization. These extreme attitudes are examples of specific metapolitics that seek to remove political conflict by reducing social phenomena to the truth of deep infrastructure, namely to the causality of productive forces and relations of production, as in the case of Marxism, which dominated one of these metapolitics in the twentieth century. The antagonism of these two radicalizations contributes to the creation of a system of false oppositions: autonomy/​commitment, revelatory approach/​instrumental approach, focus on medium/​expression of views, creation/​education, and so on. Rancière proposes to erase these from the vocabulary of contemporary aesthetics and actively let the whole system go into oblivion. Indeed, the elementary omission is that we forget about the aesthetic dimension of politics and the political dimension of aesthetics: [Politics] is a common landscape of the given and the possible, a changing landscape and not a series of acts that are the consequence of “forms of consciousness” acquired elsewhere. “Aesthetics” designates this interface. But this interface also signifies the loss

619 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 28.

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of any relationship of cause and effect between “representations” considered artistic and “engagements” considered political.620

In the aesthetic regime, art has its own metapolitics, which amounts to initiating political moments and undermining existing order in the name of equality. It functions in the domain of aisthesis, in which no positive community can be established. No particular order can capture its political dimension. The unregulated power of literature becomes all the more apparent the less duty the work imposes on itself toward the represented, which in turn means that it exists only on the verge of annihilation (M 104). Literature’s ephemeral existence is threatened by both the violence of political pedagogy and the “radical uncanny” of sensual form. Rancière devotes a separate reflection to the latter, when he sets himself the goal to describe the elusive political revealed in the work of an author regarded the advocate of pure art. Against the great philosophical works of Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, and Milner,621 Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren draws a portrait of a writer working in communal abstraction. In Mallarmé’s work, the scene of representation becomes empty: there is no more representation, no more history. There disappears the Platonic foundation or the system in which the idea upheld the realness of all things of the human world. The heaven of Eidos is gone, and in the empty space left behind it literary fiction constitutes “the conditions of human experience in general” inscribed in the “incertitude of the game” (MPS 22). Mallarmé sets in motion a reshuffling of “types” that are neither copies of entities nor models, nor embodiments, but traces of idealness stripped of sources. For this work Mallarmé employs metaphor and music. The symbolistic metaphor resembles a gesture of relocation: it shifts elements, connects them, and fuses them into a new scheme. We may notice this novelty in the title of Rancière’s book. In the representational regime, the virtue of metaphor and symbol was the constancy of associations (the lion and courage, the eagle and majesty, the serpent and cunning), while any shortcomings stemmed from inconsistency. In Ars Poetica, Horace mocks incongruous depictions as those of a beautiful woman whose torso ends with a fish tail.622 New poetry is eager to favor the principle of

6 20 Carnevale, Kelsey, “Art of the Possible,” p. 259. 621 R. Boncardo, Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018, pp. 210–​211. 622 “If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured

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desinit in piscem; the siren is the emblem of new beauty, “the beautiful power of artifice that stands in contrast to the beautiful boy whose model the Plato of the Phaedrus bequeathed to Aristotle, Aristotle to Horace, Horace to Boileau, and Boileau to everybody else” (MPS 12). In Mallarmé’s poetry, symbol and metaphor do not express ideas, nor are they –​as Badiou wants –​a mimesis of the idea (ME 108), but they bring the idea to life while imbuing it with no content. The poem becomes a premonition of the community to come and a monument to its absence. Cleansed of unproblematic referentiality, language exposes its sonic structure and turns into music; it is the most abstract writing, cut off from all corporeality and figural quality while being “the highest spiritual task,” offering people that which is “beyond nature par excellence” and which overtakes the sacred evaporating from the world (MPS 10). Therefore, destruction of the traditional art of performance is accompanied by a projection of musical action. The latter is supposed to build such a configuration of the sensible that would found a new communal bond –​namely religio –​according to the diagnoses of nineteenth-​century philology. This is the true fulfillment of post-​Romantic poetry: it becomes religion’s heir and successor. The task involved in succeeding from religion consists neither in some prosaic demystification of its celestial content, nor in the reappropriation of its sacredness on behalf of humanity. Poetry, in short, must not constitute a new religion, not even that of humankind. It must, reaching further back than the religion of music, return us to the origin of all religion as such… But these, humanity’s original poems, are not myths buried in the collective unconscious; they are forms-​of-​world that are to be resuscitated by the ordering of words (MPS 43).

The mute letter of this poetry –​which with its new typography resists loud reading –​speaks to anyone, so “anybody could appropriate it for him-​or herself and break away from the order which sets in good harmony the authority of the voice and the distribution of bodies in society” (FPA 16). Amid the babel of voices, the mute letter of poetry offers an empty formes-​de-​monde, like a sacrament of the possible communion of the future humanity. In this sense, the above reading opposes both Derrida and Badiou. On the one hand, Rancière rejects the thesis of the erasure of all designates and the staging of a crisis of meaning. Rancière writes that Mallarmé does indeed make the logic of representation

with a private view, refrain from laughing?” Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1942, p. 451.

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obsolete, but he maintains the mimetic status of the poem, which does not imitate any model, but “traces perceptibly [trace sensiblement] the movement of the Idea” (MPS 52). On the other hand, despite the images of the “poet of the Event” and the poet of the incorruptible,623 Mallarmé turns out to be a designer of community and collective life; his poem sets in motion an abstract play of “types” that demand realization. Engaged art would like to combine the clarity of political meaning with the power of perceptual shock. “In fact, this ideal effect is always the object of a negotiation between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning” (POA 63). Therefore, the very movement of distributing (the sensible and the senseful) is the place in which manifests the power of literature, while being the edge of its own annihilation. Allow me to emphasize the distance that separates this concept from other, more traditional accounts of the political of literature. Critique. Scholars frequently repeat the thesis on the strategic difference between the old and new art, the latter seeking to revolutionize social practice. The former, usually called engaged art, defined itself as an instrument of change according to Marxist interpretation, promising radical emancipation. The latter is called critical art, which operates in a specific cultural context and promises no escape from alienation, but rather illustrates the influence of decentralized power and locates sites of invisible oppression. Thus we see a shift from an optimistic and transgressive attitude to a cautious and deconstructive one.624 The problem is that critical art  –​even the one that departs from the logic of explication, meaning confusion  –​still operates inside the vicious circle of unmasking and knowledge construction. It reproduces the stigmas of domination while attempting to turn the viewer into a conscious social actor. Critical art is based on the conviction that art will revolt people through unmasking, that it has the power to generate knowledge and anger in audiences, channeling these elements in such a way as to enable transition to action. However, this causal relationship fails, because art is not a magnifying glass that shows the monstrosity of human flaws and systemic errors. We cannot construct an obvious relation between the work’s sensory structure, its interpretation, and political intervention.

623 Q. Meillassoux, “Badiou and Mallarmé: The Event and the Perhaps,” trans. A. Edlebi, Parrhesia 16/​2013, pp.  35–​47. 624 H.  Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, London and New York: Verso 2015.

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Anyone who believes in their existence in reality follows the old pedagogical model of art.625 Three themes come to the fore in the examined reflection on the critical dimension of art and literature. First, a paradoxical counter-​aimlessness. If an artwork uncovers signs of capital inscribed in ordinary objects and everyday experience –​it sustains their permanence. If art declares war on the art world system or the institution of literature and engages its resources to enact struggles against the market or aesthetic autonomy –​it hinders emancipatory efforts. A diagnosis of general entanglement and powerlessness usually follows the call to subversion. This is how the involution of the critical model unfolds: it becomes a nihilistic demonstration of the omnipotence of the market and the spectacle. Instead of problematizing the engagement itself, the critical model proposes a leap forward, namely taking art out of museums and forcing it to serve direct political purposes. Despite artists and writers’ intentions, the political potential dies in the ineffective, police management of perception: Circulation of stereotypes that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce our infantilization, media images that denounce the media, spectacular installations that denounce the spectacle, etc. There is a whole serios of forms of critical or activist art that are caught up in this police logic of the equivalence of the power of the market and the power of its denunciation.626

Second, this approach restores the representational and ethical regime:  the telos of images –​which are supposed to generate certain effects on the recipient side –​becomes subordinated to the ethos of community: “The critical art tradition wanted to combine three logics in the same formula. It sought to ascertain the ethical effect of mobilization of the energies by enclosing the effects of aesthetic distance in the continuity of representational connection”.627 Third, the alliance of selected elements of these two regimes –​a representational and an ethical one –​can ascribe itself strategic value only by virtue of an additional assumption: the recipient’s passivity. Bluntly put, this kind of artistic project presupposes

625 Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, pp. 57–​59. 626 Carnevale, Kelsey “Art of the Possible,” p. 266. 627 Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, Paris 200, pp. 73–​74. Fr. “La tradition de l’art critique a voulu articuler en une même formule ces trois logiques. Elle a tenté d’assurer l’effet éthique de mobilisation des énergies en enferment les effets de la distance ésthetique dans la continuité du rapport représentatif.”

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[t]he imbecility of the viewer while anticipating their precise effect on that viewer: for example, exhibitions that capitalize on the denunciation of the “society of the spectacle” or of “consumer society” –​bugbears that have already been denounced a hundred times –​or those that want to make viewers “active” at all cost with the help of various gadgets borrowed from advertising, a desire predicated on the presupposition that the spectator is otherwise necessarily rendered “passive” solely by virtue of his looking. An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us.628

Emancipation begins when we question the oppositions between looking and doing, reading and being-​in-​the-​world, and –​along with these elements –​the system of obviousness that defines the relations between what is said, seen, and done, a system that is the secret skeleton of all domination and slavery. This is the only way we can go beyond shock-​oriented dramaturgies subject to the effect of self-​cancellation (MDS 72). Resistance. The same accusations apply to the category of resistance. It certainly has a rich philosophical history, from Clausewitz’s doctrine to the concepts of Gandhi, Sartre, or Fanon;629 or from Thoreau to Arendt or Foucault. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, resistance moved into the realm of cultural studies, which happened mainly in the works of scholars from the Birmingham School. Since Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance Through Rituals, it has become popular to understand resistance as a defensive attitude against cultural hegemony, different from revolutionary class struggle; because the former is contextual, conjunctural, ambivalent, hybrid, and carnivalesque. Over the last decades, this category has become completely trivialized, as prove numerous studies in the field of sociology, pedagogy, or cultural studies. Rancière dislikes this notion, because it reduces egalitarian affirmation to a reaction to the system of domination while endowing this position with heroic and sometimes defeatist connotations (MP 167). In a sense, resistance creates an opponent, often endowing it with demonic qualities, especially meaning invisibility combined with omnipresence and omnipotence. Meanwhile, in the aesthetic regime, literature achieves the effect of metamorphosis in a different way. It allows to deregulate the legitimate order of discourse, destroys the purpose of the living word, and introduces dissonance into the Platonic communal harmony, namely

6 28 Carnevale, Kelsey “Art of the Possible,” p. 258. 629 See H. Caygill, On Resistance:  A  Philosophy London: Bloomsbury 2013.

of

Defiance,

New

York–​

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the pre-​established orchestration of three elements: citizen jobs and professions, their ways of being, and common law, which is not only the nomos of the community but also its “melody” or tone (FW 103). Literature achieves this by discontinuing the “political” self-​programming and exploring aesthetic autonomy. Its fixation on résistance makes literature one of the many tools of social action, while its power is founded on the peculiar “act of suspending the word:” In general, I call suspensive an existence that has no place of its own in a redistribution of properties and bodies. Therefore, it cannot appear without interrupting the relation between the order of properties and the order of denominations. A suspensive existence has the status of an excess unit deprived of its body, which superimposes itself on a particular set of bodies and properties. This is also an existence that plays out ad hoc, during the act that each time radically performs a power that has no other proof.630

Narrativization. Another common knowledge holds that literature serves to narrativize human experience. Its “natural” tendency to create plots is supposedly related to the spontaneous need to bind people and objects in a network of dynamic relationships that support subjectification processes. Narratologists’ disputes concern the nature of this spontaneity, appropriately located either in human psyche or in the very essence of culture. This entails the following dilemma:  either mental processes already have the form of narratives or people produce narratives and impose them on the disorderly plethora of phenomena. Thus, narrative can be the structure of our episteme or the structure of a cultural text. Representatives of the former position like Barbara Hardy, David Carr, or Carlos Gonzales Prado argue that the narrative is mind’s primal act transferred from life to art. In this view, it turns out that we “weave narratives and live in them,” that we “we dream in narrative, day-​dream in narrative … hate and love by narrative.” On the other hand, others like Paul Ricœur, Alasdair MacIntyre, Kenneth J. Gergen, or Hayden White maintain a clear separation of the world independent of human cognition and narrative as a form of structuring cultural and linguistic discourses. In their view, the narrative is a cultural code that lends form and direction to a simple sequence of events. It is a symbolic system that

630 Rancière, “L’inadmissible,” p. 181. Fr. “J’appelle suspensive, en général, une existence qui n’a pas de place dans une répartition des propriétés te des corps. Aussi bien ne peut-​elle se poser sans déranger le rapport entre l’orde des properiétés et l’orde des dominations. Une existence suspensive a le statut d’une unité en-​plus, sans corps propre, qui vient s’incrire en surimpression sur un assemblage de corps et de propriétés. C’est aussi une existence qui se joue au coup par coup, dans l’acte qui, à chaque fois, effectue singulièrement une puissance qui n’a pas d’autre attestation.”

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enables (self-​)cognition.631 However, both groups share the conviction that we make the world coherent through narratives, and that through the medium of stories, the world yields to our understanding. From this viewpoint, literature turns out to be a basic model of sense-​making and order-​creating operations, and its inclination toward narrative systems testifies to the inalienable need for this kind of order. Rancière’s reluctance toward such an approach stems from the reformulation of the problem I already described. In his thought there is a distribution of the sensible as something already established; in this sense, we may state that “at the beginning there was distribution.”632 Recorded in the cognized object and the cognizing thought, the thing and the word, the division is protected by police and naturalized as part of a social consensus, yet it remains vulnerable to reconfiguration and dehierarchization. Built from different forms of visibility, the world can be rewritten and reformed, while the field of art and politics overlap as sites of establishing the dispute that questions the legalized obviousness of distribution; the patterns that structure experience are negotiated and challenged in both fields. What role does the plot play in this system? Often, especially in the representational regime –​in which it is a constitutive element of fiction –​plot is not an operator of change but a schematic means of confirming the existing state of affairs. Rancière argues that “the era of the novel”  –​from Wilhelm Meister’s travels through the failed intrigues of Balzac’s protagonists and Julien Sorel’s absurd gunshot to the fatigue of Büchner’s Danton, Frédéric Moreau’s indolence, and the fleeting illusions of Tolstoy’s protagonists  –​is ruled by one obsession:  the fall of action (LT 101). As the most clearly structured form of the plot, action is rejected as a mode of thought and model of rationality that orders relations between cause and effect, center and periphery, that divides people into separate categories and institutes the poetic unity of their ways of being and acting. The weakening of plot structures allows authors to leave the representational regime and negate the underlying organic model of society, allowing for the emergence of new music:  “the new music of indistinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, which seizes within the same tonality the lives of servants in the countryside and those of great ladies of the capital, the music expressing the capacity of anyone at all to experience any form of sensible experience at all”

631 A.  MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2007, p.  211. 632 Aspe, Partage de la nuit, p. 42. Fr. “Au commencement était la division.”

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(LT 17). The suspicious attitude of the nineteenth-​century novel toward plot only intensified in the twentieth century; in modern epic, we see a reduction of plot and inflation of description. Literature is a model practice of distributing the sensible that escapes the logic of the master (authority and rule) and the logic of destiny (predestination and purpose). Literature becomes a political activity without having to directly engage in the struggles of its time, because its presumed “purity” serves to build relationships between seemingly separate things. Hence, immersed in the infinite process of distributing the sensible, human resembles a literary or poetic animal, according to another variant of the following formula: “Humans are political animals because they are poetic animals and by striving to verify shared poetic capacity, each person for him-​or herself, they are able to establish a community of equals” (LT 87). It is only this poetic power that allows people to escape “natural destiny,” social fate, lifeless consensus, and tautology’s tyranny. Literature shows how to escape from the prison of surveillance and from the prison of “soul,” which is the tool of control over bodies.

The Spectacle of the Scaffold Invitation to a Beheading is Vladimir Nabokov’s eighth and penultimate novel in Russian, written in Berlin in 1935 and published three years later. Its action is set in an unnamed country and unspecified future –​indicated only by such terms as “mythical nineteenth century” and “ancient journals of the twentieth century” –​in a world of technological decadence and rigid totalitarianism. All events happen in a fortress built on a rock, separated by a riverbed from the city and the vast Tamara Gardens. In this fortress, the main character Cincinnatus C. awaits his execution. He seems to be the only inmate, although inscriptions on walls suggest the presence of other prisoners; we also learn that his father met a similar fate before him. Cincinnatus’s primary crime is his otherness. He is prone to pensiveness and is unusually sensitive, which has already been the cause of much of his torment. As flashbacks reveal, Cincinnatus worked in a toy factory, where he met his wife Marthe. She cheated on him permanently, without hiding it at all, and she eventually gave birth to two crippled and ugly children. Although Cincinnatus was not their biological father at all, he had to take care of them as caregiver. He managed to hide his otherness for a while, but once –​ during a gathering in the city park –​he was uncovered as a stranger, arrested, and jailed with a death sentence.

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In prison, Cincinnatus feels even more alienated. The date of his execution is kept secret from him, so each day could be his last. The prison guard, the director, and the lawyer all perform rather enigmatic rituals, including chitchat, meals, and even dances. They also look very similar, their names Rodion, Roman, and Rodrig begin with the same letter,633 and sometimes they swap roles. Cincinnatus’s torment of uncertainty gradually extends to the torture of unreality, as he no longer believes in the reality of the prison world. The situation deteriorates to the rhythm of successive painful disillusions: Marthe’s visit turns into a bourgeois comedy of errors as she arrives with her parents, siblings, children, and a new lover; meeting with his mother results in nothing more than a trivial conversation with barely any signs of closeness; the other prisoner, M’sieur Pierre, turns out to be a jovial bon vivant in perfect comradeship with the three jailors, tormenting Cincinnatus with anecdotes, advice, and life wisdom. The sequence of disillusions overlaps with a sequence of false promises: the tunnel that someone laboriously drills into the rock every night is a corridor invented by M’sieur Pierre as a secret passage between two cells; Emmie, the director’s daughter, promises to free Cincinnatus but leads him to her father’s dining room. Both sequences –​of lost illusions and failed escapes –​culminate in the discovery that M’sieur Pierre, albeit pretending to be a friend, in truth is an executioner. In the final scene, it is him who awaits Cincinnatus at the place of public execution. Let us return to the beginning of the novel. Unlike detective stories, the novel begins with the announcement of the sentence. We do not know its details, just as we do not know the course of the investigation or the charges; the verdict itself is announced in a whisper. The ostentatiously unconventional opening based on an inversion of the usual order634 forces interpreters to look for another integrating formula. Indeed, Invitation to a Beheading has been read in many ways: as a dystopia, a political satire on Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, a metaphysical or gnostic work, an allegorical image of the individual persecuted by the collective, a metaphor for the condition of the artist, and a metaliterary game. I will briefly reconstruct these interpretations to next consider what appears to be

633 It was read as an allusion to the character of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. See J. W. Connolly, “Invitation to a Beheading: V. Nabokov, “Violin in a Void,” in: Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading:” A Critical Companion, ed. J. W. Connolly, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1997, p. 12. 634 “[S]o we are nearing the end,” we read at the beginning. V. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. D. Nabokov, New York: Perige Books 1979, p. 12.

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banished from the language of exegetes –​perhaps due to Nabokov’s own strong opinions –​namely the political in this “prose poem.”635 So far, scholars have considered this issue in the traditional languages of biographical interpretation and reconstruction of the work’s ideological content.636 Nabokov wrote Invitation to a Beheading in Berlin, during the period of rampant Nazism, which aroused his anger and disgust; we should remember that Nabokov’s wife, Vera Slonim, was Jewish. Thus, the work is to accuse Hitlerism and Stalinism (the characters speak Russian, the lawyer’s surname is Vissarionovich) while all its metaphors would summarize in the denunciation of totalitarianism as a pathological system that destroys all individuality (like cancer that unifies all that is diverse). Cincinnatus’s “basic illegality”637 would be reduced to his individualism, forbidden in the world of social homogenization and interchangeability of roles. The vision of the future in which “there is no me,” as in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, allows us to classify Nabokov’s work as a genre fiction, a peripheral example of a dystopia. As we know, Nabokov rejects such interpretations, fiercely defending literature against all attempts of instrumentalization. He expresses a general disinterest toward politics, repeating that art is perfectly autonomous and cannot serve any purpose. He declares: I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment … I am not ‘sincere,’ I am not ‘provocative,’ I am not ‘satirical.’ I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent.638

His views on public affairs summarized in phrases “freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art”639 discourage most interpreters from making political actualizations of his works. Instead, mixing the politics of literature with the politics of the writer, most assume that literature created in the spirit of lofty aestheticism must remain a play of pure formal qualities. Moreover, we may regard Cincinnatus himself as a figure of withdrawal from the public world into

6 35 This was the name used by Nabokov. See Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading,” p. 143. 636 R. Alter, “Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” in: R. Alter, Motives for Fiction, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1984. 637 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 30. 638 V. Nabokov, “Foreword,” in:  Nabokov, Bend Sinister, New York:  Vintage Books 1990, p. 12. 639 V.  Nabokov, Strong Opinions, New York: Vintage Books 1990, pp. 34–​ 35.

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the world of dreams in consistent voluntary escapism. He is a melancholic lost in late, degenerated modernity, unfit for its rational standards, endlessly recalling the lost world of childhood and youthful love, captured in the synecdoche of the enchanting Tamara Gardens. In this perspective, the title markedly refers to works of Baudelaire. First, the obligatory intertext may be the poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” in which refrain-​like repetitions evoke the image of an ideal land, the unreal There.640 Second, the title may refer to the fragment of Paris Spleen entitled in the same way, which describes a vision of a visit to a dream country of Cocaigne with a friend.641 However, the disillusive mechanism that gives power to the plot destroys the consolation inherent in dreams and idealized memories. Childhood turns out to be tainted with perversion,642 images of the Arcadian “there” –​a trompe-​l’oeil illusion as Tamara Gardens is in fact a tacky landscape and the supposed window turns out to be a painting, while the happy “ago” –​a retrospective illusion. The latter disenchantment is illustrated by the motif of old newspapers through which Cincinnatus browses in search of traces of another world. In doing so, he duplicates the gesture of all protagonists of classical anti-​utopias and dystopias, for whom contact with the past is meant to serve the discovery of the truth about the world and about themselves to reverse the process of personality loss. In ancient periodicals, the prisoner finds this remote world, where the simplest objects sparkled with youth and an inborn insolence, proceeding from the reverence that surrounded the labor devoted to their manufacture. … Everything was lustrous and shimmering; everything gravitated passionately toward a kind of perfection whose definition was absence of friction.643

It is an image of a strong and powerful world, like in illo tempore, which preserves the power of the creative gesture and moves toward the ideal telos:  an image made of mythological clichés whose accumulation should cause vigilance. Besides, the protagonist also has doubts:

640 Ch. Baudelaire, “Invitation to the Voyage,” in: Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. J. McGowan, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p. 109. 641 Ch. Baudelaire, “XVIII. L’Invitation Au Voyage,” in: Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. L. Varese, New York: New Directions 1988, p. 32. 642 As Leszek Engelking argues in his Chwyt metafizyczny. Vladimir Nabokov –​estetyka z sankcją wyższej rzeczywistości. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego 2011, p. 32, this is personified by Emmie who is a prototype for Lolita. 643 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 50.

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“But then perhaps,” thought Cincinnatus, “I am misinterpreting these pictures. Attributing to the epoch the characteristics of its photograph. The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of a tanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one element to another –​perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot, to a particular kind of heliotype, to special forms of that art.644

Thus, the paths leading into the domain of childhood, ideal affection, and past glories close one after another. There is no escape either into “ago” –​into one’s own youth or the youth of the world –​or into “there,” contrary to the misleading name of Tamara Gardens, which conveys the Russian word tam (там), which literally means “there.” It seems that the hic et nunc of the prison’s “striped world” is doomed to ultimate triumph. If this does not happen, it is due to a specific doubling that Nabokov creates through a literary trick, which he mastered to perfection. Critics describe this trick as “bispatiality,”645 or in metaphysical terms, as “otherworldliness” (Russian потусторонность). First, we may refer to the rich metaliterary plan. The novel is filled with references and intertexts to such authors as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Gumilev, Hugo, Dickens, Caroll, Blok, Bergson, Wells, Kafka, Joyce, and Andreev.646 Thus, the textual world reveals its semiotic character while all characters except for Cincinnatus turn out to be lacking depth. However, in the end, Cincinnatus realizes that the reality around him is fictional, that it is a writer’s creation,647 and having doubted it, he wakes up to a reality of another kind. As Allan Thiher argues, it is a rule in Nabokov’s work that he sees something humorous in the immanence of linguistic meanings, namely in that words refer only to themselves. Solipsistically enclosed in their languages, his protagonist either do not notice this immanence or –​like Cincinnatus –​declare war on the world in which they live, a world that is untrue and ultimately created by the Author.648 644 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 51. 645 M. Grishakova, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames, Tartu: University of Tartu Press 2012, p. 236. L. Engelking, Chwyt metafizyczny, p. 408. 646 S. Davydov, “Invitation to a Beheading,” in: The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. V. E. Alexandrov, New York: Taylor and Francis 1995, pp. 188–​201; A. Dolinin, “Art of The Executioner: Notes on the Theme of Capital Punishment in Nabokov,” Nabokov Online Journal  8/​2014. 647 D. B. Johnson, “The Two Worlds in “Invitation to a Beheading,” in: D. B. Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985, p. 216. 648 A.  Thiher, Words in Reflection. Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago. Press 1984, pp. 97–​98.

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Second, we may also follow the tropes scattered throughout the work to define the shape of this otherworld that shines through the conventional shapes of the world-​prison. Then, we may interpret the novel in a gnostic or idealistic-​ neoplatonic key. Cincinnatus remembers what he already knew, and the whole story is organized by the dynamics of anamnesis.649 In the latter case, the story of a lonely prisoner set in a stone maze-​like space  –​where every road leads back to the cell  –​is a metaphor of people caught in the trap of the material world. Cincinnatus compares himself to a pearl, as if pointing to the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, along with the The Hymn of the Pearl, and the path of his life leads as much to his father, condemned for a similar crime, as to the mysterious God the Father. Finally, the Author-​Demiurge destroys this false world because his protagonist has passed the gnostic test.650 Generalized gnostic themes are omnipresent in literature of all eras and are certainly prey to the textual game started by the Nabokov. However, several very important signals preclude such an interpretation. I mean Cincinnatus’s manifested admiration for the material world, which is as much a prison as it is a system of sensual wonders. Besides, the sequence of unsuccessful escapes also includes the unsuccessful attempts to abandon mortal form: He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. At first, Cincinnatus simply reveled in the coolness; then, fully immersed in his secret medium, he began freely and happily to... The iron thunderclap of the bolt resounded, and Cincinnatus instantly grew all that he had cast off, the skullcap included.651

Admittedly, the words “gnostical turpiture” do appear in the novel (Russian гносеологическая гнусность). However, this term specifying Cincinnatus’s “most terrible of crimes” appears in several other formulations like “impenetrability,” “opacity,” “occlusion.”652 It is this set of phrases that builds the most important metaphorization and specifies the skándalon associated with the protagonist.

649 V.  Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991, chapter 3. 650 Davydov, “Invitation to a Beheading,” p. 200. 651 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 32–​33. 652 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 72.

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Cincinnatus’s intransparency is the root of all his suffering. In a world of imposed transparency, it is both an irremovable stigma of alienation and a crime persecuted by law; a reversal of the social order, which is illustrated by the Cyrillic anagrams of Cincinnatus’s and Pierre’s names: Ц is the reversal of П. We may easily associate transparency with Rousseau’s dream turned into a totalitarian nightmare. Invitation to a Beheading shows a world of surveillance and repression, unmasking a dangerous fantasy that founds fascism and communism.653 In this case, transparency means the annexation of the private by the public by forced openness (no secrets) and the annexation of the particular by the general, meaning perfect similarity among social actors (no inner being). This results in the disappearance of individuality and interchangeability of roles as in the case of the lawyer qua director qua guardian. Except for Cincinnatus, all characters join in the game of doppelgangers, and their eccentric disguises only conceal their perfect similarity. If everyone around is “wretched specters, not people,”654 it is because of their lack of individual characteristics. If they are “werewolves”655 (Russian оборотни), it is because of their ability to suddenly turn into someone else. The individual who against the law has retained their identity is condemned to solitude and ultimately to annihilation, but before that, they must be isolated and thrown into the panoptic space of solitary confinement:656 “Cincinnatus, who seemed pitch-​black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-​size block of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in such a way as to seem translucent.”657 The secret flaw of Cincinnatus is that he does not let light pass through but refracts its rays in a particular way. In other words, he filters the perceived world through his individual sensorium and unique sensitivity, deforming it through metaphor. The latter is of great importance, because the interpersonal interactions in Invitation to a Beheading are regulated by linguistic transparency. Everyone repeats worn-​out phrases and understands each other in mid-​sentence. 653 M.  Bieńczyk, Przezroczystość, Kraków: Znak 2007, p. 152. 654 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 36. 655 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 40. 656 Cincinnatus’s cell seems to have some features of Bentham’s panopticon: “the solicitous sunshine of public concern penetrated everywhere, and the peephole i the door was placed in such a way that in the whole cell there was not a single point that the observer on the other side of the door could not pierce with his gaze.” Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, pp.  24–​25. 657 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, pp.  25–​26.

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Suddenly there appears a stranger in this community that views consensus as its foundation –​the ideal agreement between the sensible and the senseful –​operating with a perfectly communicative idiom. His otherness means a disturbing subjectivization (followed by uncontrollable subjectification) and a consent to the incompatibility of words and things  –​or even more than just consent. At first, even though Cincinnatus speaks incoherently, he wants to control the linguistic entropy: “Kind. You very. (This still had to be arranged).”658 Then he intensifies it on purpose, as evidenced by his notes that fill the novel’s middle chapter. He is the only one who writes anything at all, enjoying this perversion of living speech, and he does so in a land dominated by conventional representations –​photographs and trashy drawings –​where the masterpiece is the work Quercus, a biography of an oak tree conceived as if the author were sitting on a tree with a camera, reporting on disconnected, irrelevant events, talking over boredom through dendrological, ornithological, and mythological discourses. These “distant, deceitful and dead”659 stories are as disgusting to Cincinnatus as the verbal clichés and ready-​made thoughts that fill his supervisors’ tirades. After a series of unsuccessful escapes, Cincinnatus begins to understand that the path to freedom leads neither through hope (jeopardized by the two-​faced M’sieur Pierre and the seducing and deceiving Emmie) nor through love (to which Marthe does not respond) but is possible only through art understood –​as if in Kant or Schiller660 –​ as a free play. However, this road leads through the scaffold. Nabokov’s fascination with the theme of execution has its biographical origins:  the writer’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, fought in the State Duma to abolish the death penalty. This motif is present already in his early poems and novels, from King, Queen, Knave through Glory, Despair, and The Gift even to Lolita. Execution –​especially the public and ceremonial one –​belongs to the early pre-​panoptic logic of punishment. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault analyzes a process in which the tormented body disappears as the main target of repression, the public spectacle disappears, punishment becomes a hidden part of the judicial process. Then, from the art of unbearable sensations it turns into ”economy of suspended rights”661 based on the economy of blocking (investissement) the body by power relations and subjection (assujetissement), meaning the production of the “soul” so that it can effectively rule over the body.

658 659 660 661

Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 15. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 123. T.  Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, Oxford 2010, pp. 132–​135. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 11.

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However, at the beginning of Foucault’s reflections, we find the theme of the archaic “glamour of execution” with its inherent excess: this excess cruelty that sustains the pre-​modern economy of power. The execution is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored … Its aim is not so much to re-​establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-​powerful sovereign who displays his strength.662

Cincinnatus is being led to the scaffold to be executed as a “potential regicide,”663 because in every violation of law there resides crimen majestatis. Let us add after Rancière that Cincinnatus’s otherness is an assault on the rule of common sense, and from this viewpoint, an absurd ludic attack on the consensual machine of power, which is also a machine of vision. The cruel ritual of restoring order that is to take place in Thriller Square attracts crowds with pre-​purchased circus subscriptions. Consistently present through a sequence of prison costumes and stunts, the circus theme culminates in the novel’s finale, referring us to this rich tradition along with its sacral aspect, indicated by the etymology of the word “circus” itself After all, the Latin circus means “wheel,” but it enters the Germanic languages in the meaning “temple,” as in German die Kirche or English church. The executioner –​this demonic dwarf with the name of an apostle –​is at the same time an official, an important state figure, an idol of the public, a jester, and a priest. What happens to Cincinnatus? There is a dispute among interpreters whether the condemned is killed by the executioner or whether he escapes. There are also intermediate options. In one of them, Cincinnatus’s entire visionary monolog is a record of a delusion; in another, there occurs a split of the protagonist, who dies as an impersonator of the role but continues to live as an actor. The actor supposedly leaves the theater, destroying the illusion of the Fourth Wall, and passes to the side of extra-​textual reality, in which resides the reader in the ambiguous role of the bystander.664 From my viewpoint, the most important issue

662 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp.  48–​49. 663 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 54. 664 D. Peterson, “Nabokov’s Invitation: Literature as Execution,” in: Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading;” S. Frank, “Leaving the Stage: Invitation to a Beheading,” in: S. Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012, pp.  96–​101.

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lies elsewhere, namely in the very bankruptcy of the ritual of execution, which “revealed truth and showed the operation of power”665 The fiasco is linked to the dissolution of shapes and the disappearance of reality’s resistance to the dream. Cincinnatus confesses that he lives in a dream world where everything is ennobled and spiritualized, where people are “imbued with shimmering refraction,” and their gestures “acquire an exciting significance.” He was always leaving this “majestic, free and ethereal” world to later “breathe the dust of this painted life,” but he still deludes himself that the dream is a “semi-​reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it.”666 The illusion becomes reality when the dreamer questions the division between fiction and reality. As he bids farewell to his cell, the illusion crumbles. Just before the ceremonial beheading, the whole world dissolves into nothingness, and the dangerous figures of tormentors flee jumping in a grotesque manner. The convict escapes death thanks to the fact that he finally recognizes this world as “so-​called,”667 as “fictional,” “discussed,” and “told.” Cincinnatus abandons a dichotomy that Rancière also attempts to dismantle: There is no “real world” that functions as the outside of art. Instead, there is a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common, folds in which outside and inside take on a multiplicity of shifting forms, in which the topography of what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ are continually criss-​crossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. There is no “real world.” Instead, there are definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions. The real always is a matter of construction, a matter of ‘fiction’, in the sense that I tried to define it above. What characterizes the mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-​cut line between what belongs to the self-​evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions and utopias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus by hollowing out that “real” and multiplying it in a polemical way (DOP 148–​149).

In fact, we encounter here two symmetrical artistic and political gestures: one assigned to the protagonist and the other remaining the writer’s gesture. Cincinnatus is a man of his word. Although he does not believe in his powers and envies true poets, he zealously imitates them, as evidenced by his notes:

665 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 55. 666 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 92. 667 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 69.

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what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor’s sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence; while I sense the nature of this kind of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task, a task of not now and not here.668

Cincinnatus believes that by working on worn-​out words and putting them together in an unusual way, he can make them into a world-​changing tool. His effort aims beyond hic et nunc, at the realm of omnipotence. Not being a professional poet, Cincinnatus uses language in a poetic –​unregulated –​way, which sometimes results in reprimands and critique: “Just don’t you talk so much,”669 his lawyer reprimands him; and his wife bluntly states:  “every word of yours was impossible, unspeakable.”670 What outrages and shocks everyone is the literary improper property (le propre impropre) of his articulation, which Rancière describes in “L’inadmissible,” as rooted neither in the properties of things nor in conventions, and which “circulates between what is inside and what is outside” and “dismantles the situations of division between reality and fiction.”671 Cincinnatus rescues himself from deadly oppression when he draws the ultimate conclusions from the “the experience of inhabiting”672 that is founded by literature. Already on the proscenium, with his head on the executioner’s trunk, Cincinnatus asks himself “Why am I here?” and answers it by standing up and leaving the stage. He rejects the eponymous invitation to a beheading, because he recognizes the reality of the ceremonial of power as a derivative of the dominant fiction and decides to contrast it with a fiction of a different kind. Rancière writes that “literature exposes this experience of multitude and dissensus, the experience of the extraordinary ordinary … which probes holes in any point of the consensus.”673 What synchronizes both Cincinnatus’s and Nabokov’s gestures is belief in the transformative power of words and the linking of literature and reality not as fiction and fact but as two modes of producing fiction. This powerful prose poem known as Invitation to a Beheading brings glory to art

668 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 93. 669 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 40. 670 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 200. 671 Rancière, “L’inadmissible,” p. 175. Fr. “Il y a un type d’existence qui est refusé: celui qui circulerait entre le dedans et le dehors, entre la corporéité et l’absence de corps.” 672 Rancière, “L’inadmissible” p. 181. Fr. “La littérature est une expérience de l’inhabiter.” 673 Rancière, “L’inadmissible” p. 184. Fr. “Ce qu’expose la littérature, c’est cette expérience de la multiplicité et du dissensus, cette expérience de l’ordinaire-​extraordinaire’ dont parle Jean Borreil et qui vient en n’importe quel point trouer le consensus.”

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as a transformative activity. Cincinnatus the author replicates the movements of Nabokov the author, as the former questions the current distribution of the sensible and shapes the folds of the matter of the sensible according to his own idea. He is not content with received configurations of sensations, instead trying to recompose the visible and perceptible world often by combining sensations from different registers. As we know, Nabokov is a master of synesthesia, associated with the alleged gift of colorful audition (audition colorée), extended to all sensory experiences, including the chemical senses,674 but which also remains a matter of creative technique. Invitation is organized based on inter-​sensory associations (domain of imagination) and inter-​modal associations (domain of metaphor). Detailed analysis allows identifying the synesthesia of color-​taste (bitter light), color-​touch (sticky light), sound-​touch (velvet silence), sound-​color (grey whisper), and finally color-​shape of the letter (the latter makes Tamara’s name black with flashes of green in the spectrum of interferences outlined by the writer). I keep in mind Nabokov’s tirades against the narrowly defined the political of literature. However, these philippics extend not to the political of which I write in this book. Nabokov clearly declares that “style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash;”675 but in this formula we can hear a distant echo of Flaubert’s bon mots, the model writer of politics practiced through indifference and rigor of style, whom Nabokov praised for his skillful handling of “sense data selected, permeated, and grouped by an artist’s eye.”676 In Lolita, Nabokov states that a novel should provide aesthetic pleasure, which is not a detached sensation, but a sense of having succeeded in making contact with “other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”677 For Leszek Engelking, aesthetic pleasure identified with other states of being means contact with “better, higher, more perfect reality.” In this case, “aesthetics acquires a sanction that we may call metaphysical. Therefore, artistic device –​fully deserving to be called “artistic” and belonging to true art –​becomes a metaphysical device.”678

674 V.  Nabokov, Speak, Memory, London: Penguin Books 2000, p. 29. 675 V.  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. F. Bowers, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich /​Bruccoli Clark 1980, p. xxiii. 676 Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 174. 677 V.  Nabokov, Lolita, London: Putnam 2000, p. 210. 678 Engelking, Chwyt metafizyczny, pp.  3–​4.

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However, let us note that Nabokov’s novel suggests not a transgression of being and exceeding of meta-​levels but an alternation of being, a transformation that happens because of art. If this transformation means a reconfiguration in the field of the sensible, then the artistic device may be called a political device. The novel indeed ends with constructing a different stage than the one on which the grim ceremonial of power was to occur. Cincinnatus leaves the radiance of his beheading to plunge into the night in which resound voices of “beings akin to him.” This night is a space of freedom he gained through the power of stolen spells; the same spells with which Nabokov conjured his masterpiece. It is also a space of collective promise that readers and writers of all eras make to one another.

Opening Nabokov’s novel culminates in a spectacular opening gesture  –​not necessarily aimed at another world, as I have tried to prove above. At the end of the novel, the invitation to a beheading becomes an invitation to a different dimension of reality, one that manifests through the inappropriate quality of l’écriture. All those who, like Cincinnatus, consider the sensible order to be arbitrary and prone to change are welcome; or, to paraphrase Bernard Aspe’s wordplay “prendre à la lettre les lettres errantes,” all those who would like to take literally the wandering words of literature.679 Without specific addressees, fictions are embodied in life through individual subjectification, and life itself turns into literary forms in the aesthetic regime. Like the philosophy of literature, literature becomes an instrument of emancipation when it disrupts the existing order: “I am interested in literature not as a discipline but, on the contrary, as a principle of discourse declassification. … The discourse about literature is itself always a literary discourse, the discourse about fiction is in itself a construction of a fiction” (ETP 481).680 Rancière’s numerous texts on literature exhibit an ostentatious a-​disciplinarity. This is not a history of literature that traditionally typically appears as a description of artistic forms and their evolution on a backdrop made of that which is

679 Aspe, Partage de la nuit, p. 14. 680 Fr. “Je m’interesse a la litterature non comme discipline mais au contraire comme principe de declassification des discours. … le discours sur la litterature est toujours lui-​meme un discours litteraire, le discours sur la fiction est lui-​meme la construction d’une fiction.”

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external to the actual subject: history, politics, social relations, and the development of other arts. Rancière does not try to order literary events, he does not synchronize them with the rhythm of events, nor does he treat literature as an expression of a national community’s self-​consciousness. Instead, he discovers or constructs non-​obvious connections by conducting “the operations of reformulation, rephrasing, condensation, comparison” (MT 20),681 in which various elements come together in a very peculiar relationship:  artworks, artistic projects, idioms, poetics, reception testimonies, aesthetic regimes, and all that is part of the historical distribution of the sensible, namely ideas, common-​ sense beliefs, social patterns of action, and police regulations. Rancière writes that there is nothing to be understood in his writings, that one must only accept the proposal and move along with it (MT 25). Thus, he belongs to the group of “moderate worshippers of the surface,” carefully examining the material form of text, distrustful of “vertical” interpretations, and preferring the “horizontal” model, in which –​as Ryszard Nycz writes –​“sense is activated precisely in the course of connections (in perspectival readings) of the surface level, the material manifestations of phenomena conjoined in intertextual constellations.”682 The justification for this methodological choice is a particular philosophy of literature. The latter emerges as a space of agon, in which war is waged for the political redefinition of the sensible. Both creators and recipients are in the same space of measureless deregulation in which, as in the world of Cincinnatus, at some point “everything was falling apart[, e]verything was falling,” but we can also unexpectedly hear the calls of those who are like us. Literature struggles with the visible world for its possible shape and its own definition, while the philosophy of literature becomes involved in this enduring conflict not to mitigate it, but rather to delineate frontlines and report on the local and fragile advantages of one of its sides: What art can do is always a matter of the reversal of perspectives. Police consists in saying: Here is the definition of subversive art. Politics, on the other hand, says: no, there is no subversive form of art in and of itself; there is a sort of permanent guerilla war being waged to define the potentialities of forms of art and the political potentialities of anyone at all.683

681 Fr. “Des opérations de reformulation, de rephrasage, des opérations de condensation, de comparaison.” 682 R.  Nycz, Poetyka doświadczenia. Teoria –​nowoczesność –​literatura, Warsaw: IBL 2012, p. 126. 683 Carnevale, Kelsey, “Art of the Possible,” p. 266.

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We cannot identify this sort of thinking with a theory of literature that –​as Rancière argues  –​generally confirms a commonsensical distribution of social powers, because it presents literature as an autonomous field of simulation or an entertainment. As Searle writes –​ with whom Rancière argues684 –​the writer and reader mutually agree to suspend the conventions that normally govern sending and receiving messages. Searle turns into a policeman who chases away the staring crowd and draws a clear demarcation line between different kinds of judgments by following the properties assigned to them, thus ignoring literature’s “proper impropriety.” The propre impropre of wandering words, that irreducible and anarchic element, abolishes such dualisms. Therefore, “literature is a mode of discourse that dismantles the situations of division between reality and fiction, between the poetic and the prosaic.”685 The mechanism responsible for the cancelling of this duality is the above-​ described subjectification based on disidentification and the necessary mediation of heterology. As one of the commentators remarks, two myths co-​create philosophy:  the myth of the invention of writing and the scheme of embodiment. Banished by Plato, both the telling and the silent trace of writing combine in the aesthetic regime with the scheme of incarnatio:  in reality writing bears fruit through its own performativity.686 However, this comparison is valuable only when it indicates the crucial difference –​so crucial that the whole analogy falls apart –​Rancière operates outside the scheme of salvation. Even more, he deconstructs the scheme’s substitutive and residual forms, such as the idea of commitment or aesthetic metapolitics, which ascribes a specific purpose to art and regulates the relationship between artistic production and political practice. Rancière insists that the effect-​oriented adaptation of the means of expression to a given subject was the principle of the representational regime that proposed a “poetics of general consensus” (MT 83),687 while in the aesthetic regime there is no criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue. There are only choices. A progressive or revolutionary painter or novelist in the 1920s and 1930s will generally choose a chaotic form in order to show that the reigning order is just as much a disorder... Novelistic fragmentation or pictorial

6 84 Rancière, “L’inadmissible,” pp. 174-​175. 685 Rancière, “L’inadmissible” pp. 180–​181. Fr. “la littérature est le mode de discours qui défait les situations de partage entre la réalité et la fiction, le poétique et le prosaique.” 686 J.-​D. Ebguy, “Le Travail de la verité, la verité du travail: usages de la littérature chez Alain Badiou et Jacques Rancière,” Fabula–​LHT 1/​2006. 687 Fr. “La poétique du consensus général.”

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carnivalization lend themselves just as well to describing the chaos of the capitalist world from the point of view of class struggle as to describing, from a nihilistic point of view, the chaos of a world where class struggle is itself but one element in the Dionysian chaos (POA 61).

Thus, there is no simple connection between world description and political influence, as there is no template for the correlation between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics. What factor should determine whether the atomization of novelistic worlds encourages or blocks political individuality? Rancière writes that for example Virginia Woolf ’s novels are a more significant part and document of “democratic history” than the works of Émile Zola. Woolf ’s texts design a work on the “shrinking and stretching of time” and a device of placing events at the most meticulous level, which creates a web that allows “to think through the forms of political dissensuality more effectively than the social epic’s various forms” (POA 65).688 At the same time, there is a limit at which the forms of novelistic micrology establish a mode of individuation that comes to challenge political subjectivization. There is also, however, an entire field of play where their modes of individuation and their means of linking sequences contribute to liberating political possibilities by undoing the formatting of reality produced by state-​controlled media, by undoing the relations between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable (POA 65).

These criteria must be established each time by relating literary texts to contemporary conflicts and by carefully drawing the lines of tension that emerge from between the three types of expression and their corresponding forms of equality: 1. The equality of themes and the availability of all words that can become the matter of a story about anyone’s life. 2. The democracy of mute things that speak better than a prince in a tragedy or the people’s orator. 3. The molecular democracy of causeless states and reasonless things, which cancels all decoding efforts. The subject of this cartography are the boundary lines that separate different forms of the silent word –​the domain of over-​meaning and the domain of under-​ meaning  –​along with different strategies toward the equality of themes, namely

688 Scholars also compare Rancière’s writings to modern epics. James Swenson argues that La Nuit des prolétaires resembles Woolf ’s The Waves –​ in any case more of a modernist novel than anything else in the historiographical tradition. See J. Swenson, “Style indirect libre,” in: Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, p. 263.

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radicalizing the separating muteness from the democratic bustle or expanding the democracy of the writing. The map should also include liminal formulas of full identification with life and pure esthetics, the neighboring of emancipatory slogans and new formulae of sensuality, message legibility, and radical uncanniness. Literature creates new forms of political subjectivity through the redistribution of “possibilities” and “capacities.” The philosophy of literature should likewise define its action to destabilize orders of feeling and speaking, unlock diverse articulations, and refuse obedience to discipline and disciplines.689 It is a reflection that discovers literature’s own thought, mediated by a specific idiom, or to use Philippe Sabot’s typology, a reflection that lies outside the didactic and hermeneutic schemes but within the production scheme. The point of this strategy is neither to read literature in the context of strong theory nor to discover the source meaning of a work but to show fhow a literary text “produces” its own truth, how it “arrives at its own truths through the mediation of philosophy.”690 To be able to see the means of expression proper to literature as instruments of political action, rather than symptoms of the political and ideological processes that supposedly precede and absolutely determine them, we must avoid instrumentalization and reductionism. Literature is neither a national self-​consciousness nor a testimony, nor a symptom, but a “way of doing and making that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (POA 9). Rancière develops in his own way the well-​known formula of “literature as philosophy,” which we may associate with Arthur Danto’s campaign in his fight against the primacy of philosophical discourse and increasing art critique vassalization.691 Interpretation becomes here a tool for the transfiguration of real objects and a keystone of identity, thus –​a political activity. Therefore, Rancière’s is a peculiar fighting theory. This theory is “fighting” because the commentary text itself becomes a dissensual form. When the subject is aesthetics of politics (acts of political subjectification that redefine the sensible) and politics of aesthetics (new forms of word circulation that break with the old configuration of the possible), each study becomes

689 M.-​A. Baronian and M. Rosello, “Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity (Interview),” trans. G. Elliott, Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2.1/​2008. 690 Ph.  Sabot, Philosophie et littérature. Approches et enjeux d’une question, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 2002, p. 96. Fr. “Advient à certaines vérités par l’entremise de la philosophie.” 691 A.  Danto, L’Assujettissement philosophique de l’art, Paris: Seuil 1993, esp. ch. 8: “La Littérature comme philosophie.”

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actively involved in processes of “dividing-​up of the world” (DOP 36). Next, the theory is “peculiar” because it presupposes no direct consequences that we could consider in terms of liberation and emancipation; instead, the theory is calculated to detect/​inspire/​project dislocations that modify the map of what can be thought, named, felt, and acted. Critique of Rancière’s interpretive practice concern its purpose and effectiveness, along with the method itself. Some ask who might be considered the model reader of Rancière’s books and whether his elliptical enigmatic style does not condemn his ideas to inaudibility.692 Such a critique presupposes that “fighting theory” should adapt its means of expression to the intended purpose, even at the cost of abandoning certain nuances. Rancière could probably reply in Deleuze’s words that “style in philosophy is the movement of concepts” or the device of subjecting language to such tensions that it leans toward the outside,693 and any compromises in this matter threaten with falling into shallow journalism, a telling example of “new philosophy.” Other critics wonder whether Rancière’s proposal could be transformed into an interpretative method: they answer negatively, pointing to the lack of a coherent theory of reading, which is replaced by a metaphorical vision of the circulation of wandering words.694 Nevertheless, as I have tried to show in this book, this “vision” holds a systematic coherence and as such inspires a growing number of literary scholars. The objections of professional literary critics focus on the problem of literature’s historicity. They foreground that Rancière seems to claim that literature has no history, that literature only repeatedly uncovers its own contradictions. By doing so, Rancière is to deprive literature of its eventual aspect, of its dynamics and unpredictability, in pursuit of a “reversed essentialism” that “fixes literature in a destiny simultaneously immobile and empty.”695 However, such an approach reduces the complexity of the relations that Rancière explores between the dynamic and the static, the current and the constant. Indeed, he tries to de-​historicize the systemic a priori –​contrary to Foucault –​but only to reveal the dynamics of internal tensions and the inventive artistic forms it generates. The apparent stability of the aesthetic regime presupposes a permanent transgression (after all there is “the union of art with

6 92 Y. Michaud, “Les Pauvres et leur philosophe,” Critique 601–​602/​1997. 693 G.  Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–​1990, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press 1997, p. 140. 694 R. Pasquier, “Politiques de la lecture,” Labirynthe 17.1/​2004. 695 L.  Jenny, La Fin de l’intériorité, Paris: Presses universitaires de France 2002, p. 11 ff. Fr. “Fige la littérature dans un destin à la fois immobile et vide.”

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non-​art;” A  37), interference (with a specific dipositif of the representational and ethical regimes), and search for new means of expression and forms of influencing the reader. Another doubt stems from the allegedly ill-​considered historicity of artistic and political forms. Polemicists argue that Rancière chooses two anachronistic figures on which he builds his theory: one is the figure of the proletarian, the other is a model of the word based on the nineteenth-​century novel. Rancière is to absolutize old models of political activity and interaction with literature to liberate the subject from all context and temporality, while literature evolves, as do models of reception and forms of acting and transforming the world. Furthermore, as Jean-​Luc Nancy notes, the place of literature and cinema belongs today to another process, one devoid of purpose and proper narration, linked to the domination of technology, the spread of television and video games, shaping the landscape of general insignificance and equivalence.696 Hence, Rancière is to displace essential concerns into the realm of unreality, choosing fiction over critical thought, developing the practice of “as if ” that creates an imaginary aesthetic community.697 The strength of this doubt –​usually expressed in a less warring tone than in the above-​discussed text –​was demonstrated by the discussion that followed Rancière’s lecture at the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique.698 Jacques Derrida asked whether the choice of the century in which Marx’s philosophy crystallizes was accidental or necessary, and whether such an analysis could be repeated for earlier or later eras. Rancière replied that he is not trying to privilege the nineteenth century in any way, but it was then that the problem of “speaking oneself ” became clear and left many traceS. However, Derrida insisted by asking whether such an approach does not imply a political ethics aimed at reconstructing a discourse at its true source.699

696 J.-​L. Nancy, “Malentendu?,” Europe 1097–​1098/​2020; Jacques Rancière  –​Andreï Platnov, p. 72. 697 de Gandt, Subjectivation politique, pp.  94–​95. 698 The Center was established in 1980 at the École Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm, under the patronage of Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy. The Center aimed at the philosophical critique of political theory and the critical revision of philosophical traditions in terms of politics or the political. See Ph. Lacoue-​Labarthe, J.-​L. Nancy, “Ouverture,” in: J.-​L.  Nancy, Rejouer le politique. Travaux du Centre de recherches sur la politique, Paris: Éditions Gailée 1981, pp. 11–​19. 699 J. Rancière, “La Représentation de l’ouvrier ou la classe impossible (Discussion),” in: Le Retrait du politique, eds. Ph. Lacoue-​Labarthe, J.-​L. Nancy, Paris: Éditions Gailée 1983, p. 111.

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Rancière repeated that he does not cherish the chimera of sources, nor does he absolutize any specific model of correlation between literature and politics. On the contrary, he seeks to liberate texts by severing the conceptual attachments that bind words to a particular place, discipline, or function. The text corpus on which he works includes canonical works from different epochs –​from Wordsworth through Balzac and Tolstoy to Conrad, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner –​and the recurrent references to the Romantics and the early realists stem from the need to define the basic parameters of the aesthetic revolution. In this vein of thinking, Flaubert can be considered the “founding metaphor” of Rancière’s reflection on literature,700 albeit this function also fits Rimbaud or Mallarmé. The aim of this interpretative strategy is not to bracket historicity but to juxtapose the static, vertical structures of the history of literature with the dynamic and horizontal reading that scrutinizes the relationship between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics, a reading that considers the conditions under which an artwork becomes involved in the distribution of the sensible. The experience of a literature reader is crucial to Rancière, who directly declares: “I have spent more time reading writers than philosophers” (ETP 157).701 As a reader, Rancière is an amateur, who operates mainly by paraphrasing and rephrasing, and an ignorant. Like Jacotot, Rancière seeks in the works he reads neither “authentic” nor “hidden meaning.” He treats a literary work as a set of organized linguistic gestures or verbal operations in which thought manifests itself. He is convinced that the power of wandering words always manifests in a particular historical configuration that calls for a reconstruction, although we simultaneously cannot turn texts into testimonies or exemplifications that would duplicate the discourses of social sciences. Rancière declares that he moves into someone else’s statement to make it drift (faire dériver), to liberate it from being assigned to a particular genre, mode of thinking and speaking, to make it part of common thought (MT 23). This is what I sought to do in this book with Rancière’ statements, because I believe that the purpose of reading –​like the purpose of writing –​is to animate a polemical force capable of transforming the world.

700 S. M. Guénoun, “Le Romancier démocrate et le philosophe plébéien. Gustave Flaubert et Jacques Rancière,” Revue Flaubert 7/​2007. 701 Fr. “J’ai passé au total plus de temps à lecture des écrivains qu’à celle des philosophes.”

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Index Abensour Miguel  110, 171, 268 Adorno Theodor, właśc. Theodor  65, 87, 88, 93, 94, 102, 242 Agamben Giorgio  227 Alexander Jeffrey  217 Alexandrov Vladimir  290, 291 Alföldy Géza  169 Allison Henry E.  90 Alter Robert  288 Althusser Louis  12–​16, 22, 99, 181, 203, 204, 207, 221, 241, 246, 271 Anderson Perry  19 Angenot Marc  121, 122 Antelm Robert  94 Arendt Hannah  42, 97, 98, 187, 243, 283 Aron Raymond  15, 19 Artaud Antoine  247, 248 Artous Antoine  150 Aspe Bernard  42, 167, 220, 260, 261, 285, 298 Audier Serge  16 Auerbach Erich  52, 53, 55 Aurevilly Barbey d’  31 Austin John Langshaw  54, 55, 203 Bach Johann Sebastian  252, 268 Badiou Alain  12, 18, 25, 104, 107, 108, 111, 122, 123, 148, 152, 156–​158, 163, 178, 191, 208, 279–​281,  300 Balibar Étienne  12, 111, 150, 155, 164, 208, 259 Ballanche Pierre-​Simon  168, 169 Balzac Honoré de  46, 47, 50, 51, 305 Barbier Rémi  103 Bardet Marie  261

Barthélemy Jules  179 Barthes Roland  18, 41, 46, 47, 225, 240, 241, 278 Bataille Georges  110, 163, 274 Baudelaire Charles  47, 74, 289 Baudrillard Jean  97, 130, 131, 228 Bauman Zygmunt  63, 128, 216, 224, 267 Baumgarten Alexander Gottlieb  81, 82 Bazard Saint-​Armand  179 Beck Urlich  63, 92, 109 Bednarek Joanna  162 Bell David F.  202 Benjamin Walter  19, 95, 100, 171, 180, 182, 183, 273 Bensaid Daniel  157 Bergson Henri  290 Berleant Arnold  79, 96 Berlin Isaiah  116 Berman Marshall  28, 61, 62 Besana Bruno  81 Beuys Josef  87 Bey Hakim  193 Bieńczyk Marek  292 Biesta Gert  261 Birnbaum Antonia  104, 163, 172, 194, 233, 259, 261 Birrell Ross  235 Blanchot Maurice  248, 274 Blanqui August  170, 171 Blondiaux Loic  103 Boileau Nicolas  252, 280 Bolman Brad  259 Boltanski Luc  19 Boreil Jean  275 Bossuet Jacques-​Bénigne  252

332

Index

Bosteels Bruno  105, 142 Boucher David  198 Boudon Raymond  17, 256 Bourdieu Pierre-​Félix  16, 20, 22, 25, 44, 104, 105, 148, 156, 189, 205–​ 218, 220–​223, 254, 255, 264–​269, 271, 272 Bowman Paul  30, 98 Braque Georges  92 Bras Laurence Le  227 Braudel Fernand  236, 238–​240 Breaugh Martin  202 Friedrich Brecht  25, 197, 240–​247,  277 Brooks Linda Marie  89 Brown Frederick  47, 90 Brown Wendy  157 Bruner Jerome  257 Bubner Rüdiger  80 Buck-​Morss Susan  199 Burguiere Andre  200 Burns Timothy  125 Butler Judith  148, 178, 203 Cabet Étienne  182, 183 Caillé Alain  217 Camus Albert  94 Camus Renaud  94, 148 Canguilhem Georges 10 Caroll Lewis  290 Carr David  284 Casillo Ilaria  103 Castoriadis Cornelius  133–​135, 185, 221 Caygill Howard  283 Certeau Michel de  268, 269 Cervantes y Saavedra  28, 52, 59 Cézanne Paul  64 Chambers Samuel A.  98, 105, 109 Chateauraynaud Francis  103 Chevrier Marc  110 Chiapello Eve  19

Ching-​Yu Lin  235 Chirico Giorgio de  92 Chollet Mona  30 Chow Rey  30 Friedrich Christian  82, 85, 96 Cingolani Patrick  178, 260 Clavel Maurice  19 Colet Louise  33 Colson Daniel  270 Connolly Julian W.  287 Konrad Korzeniowski  34, 48, 51, 305 Constant Benjamin  19 Corcuff Philippe  220 Corneille Pierre  46 Cornu Laurence  12 Corroyer Grégory  120 Couture Yves  110 Crépon Marc  192 Crick Bernard  132 Critchley Simon  13 Crowther Paul  92 Curtis David Ames  133 Dahl Robert  186, 191, 193 Danto Arthur  302 Danton Georges Jacques  285 Davies Anna J.  74 Davis Olivier  9, 14, 163, 181, 205, 221, 238, 240, 253 Davydov Sergej  290, 291 Dean Jodi  141 Debord Guy Ernest  133, 224–​227,  229 Debussy Achille-​Claude  268 Deleuze Gilles  11, 16, 24, 35, 36, 92, 162, 274, 303 Déotte Jean-​Louis  95, 115 Deranty Jean-​Phillipe  21, 109, 142 Derrida Jacques  16, 49, 127, 274, 280, 304 Derycke Marc  203 Descombes Vincent  13

Index

Dickens Charles John Huffam  290 Diderot Denis  247 Didi-​Huberman Georges  69, 148, 163, 244–​246 Dolinin Alexander  290 Dos Passos John Roderigo  38 Marcel Duchamp  64 Dufrenne Mikel  81, 96 Dumouchel Daniel  79 Durkheim Emile  61 Duroux Yves  12 Eagleton Terry  35, 151, 269 Ebguy Jacques-​David  300 Edlebi Alyosha  281 Elliott Gregory  302 Enfantin Prosper  179 Engelking Leszek  289, 290, 297 Engels Friedrich  154 Escarpit Robert  46 Establet Roger  12 Fanon Frantz Omar  283 Farge Arlette  200 Featherstone Mike  29 Febvre Lucien  22, 236–​238 Fénelon François  252 Ferry Luc  16, 19 Finkielkraut Allan  17, 190 Flaubert Gustave  25, 27–​34, 36–​38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 51, 59, 94, 119, 195, 305 Foerster Maxime  172 Fornelski Piotr  28 Foster Hal  281 Foucault Paul Michel  16, 25, 44, 45, 56, 99, 100, 102, 104, 139, 149, 229–​235, 248, 274, 283, 293–​295,  303 Fourier Charles  174 Fourniau Jean-​Michel  103 Frank Siggy  294

333

Freire Paolo  261 Freud Sigmund  17, 68–​70, 84, 132, 135 Fukuyama Francis  22, 124–​127 Fuller Loie  52 Furet François  19, 237, 239 Game Jérôme  194 Karamchand Gandhi  283 Gandt Marie de  304 Gauchet Marcel  141, 221 Gauny Louis-​Gabriel  13, 20, 176–​ 178, 180, 202, 203 Gautier Théophile  44 Geldof Koenraad  268 Gergen Kenneth J.  284 Gerrard Lisa  30 Gibson Andrew  109 Giddens Anthony  63 Girard René  137 Glucksmann André  19, 20 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von  59 Goffman Erving  163, 211 Gogol Nikołaj Wasiljewicz  290 Gouges Olimpia de  172 Gourgues Guillaume  103 Gray John  116 Greco Maria Beatriz  261 Greenberg Martin Harry  65 Grignon Claude  220 Gualandi Alberto  115 Guattari Félix  35 Gudelis Mykolas  189 Guénoun Solange M.  70, 94, 305 Guiette Robert  73 Gurvitch Georges  181 Gutenberg 61 Guy Emmanuel  227 Habermas Jürgen  61, 88, 101, 120–​122,  140 Hall Stuart  267

334

Index

Hallward Peter  162, 163, 170, 256, 261 Han Béatrice  230 Hardt Michael  141, 160, 161, 163, 164, 230 Hardy Barbara  284 Haydn Franz Joseph  252 Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  57, 86, 126, 199 Heinich Nathalie  266 Herder Johann Gottfried von  43 Herer Michał  35, 36 Hewlett Nick  111 Hitler Adolf  146, 244 Hobsbawm Eric J.  151, 200 Hobson Doothy  267 Hocqenghem Guy  17 Hodgman Thomas  259 Hölderlin Johann Christian Friedrich  24, 44, 64, 86 Homer  44, 68, 174 Honneth Axel  111, 259, 260 Huberman Didi  69, 148, 163, 244–​246 Hudzik Jan  80 Hugo Wiktor, właśc. Victor Marie Hugo  88, 290

Johnson Barton D.  49, 290 Joyce James Augustine Aloysius  33, 92, 290

Ibsen Henrik Johan  69 Illich Ivan  262 Ivens Maria  270

Labrousse Ernest  200 Lacan Jacques-​Marie-​Émile  12, 16, 108 Laclau Ernesto  117, 118, 164, 184 Lacoue-​Labarthe Philippe  86, 233, 304 Lahir Bernard  216, 267 Lane Jeremy F.  13, 239 Lang Jacek  92 Lasch Christopher  129 Latour Bruno  207 Lauritsen Holger Ross  192 Lefebvre Remi  103 Lefort Claude  133, 141, 150, 185, 193

Jacob Max  73–​77, 134, 136, 238 Jacotot Jean Joseph  9, 13, 251, 252, 256–​258, 260, 261, 263, 305 Jambet Christian  19 James Henry  50 Jameson Frederic  38, 277 Jan Duns Szkot, właśc. Johannes Duns Scotus 186 Jdey Adney  81, 94 Jenny Laurent  303

Kafka Franz  290 Kamber Gerald  74 Kant Immanuel  24, 25, 78–​85, 89–​92, 167, 268, 269, 293 Kaufmann Jean Claude  216 Kelly Paul  198 Kepesh David  144 Kermode Frank  53 Khiari Sadri  148 Klossowski Pierre  274 Kojev Alexandre  126 Kollias Hector  45 Komendant Tadeusz  248 Kompridis Nikolas  111 Kristeva Julia  55, 279 Krochmalný Ondoej  70 Kropotkin Piotr Aleksiejewicz  109 Kruszelnicki Michał  274 Krzemieniowa Krystyna  80 Kubicki Roman  114 Kuderowicz Zbigniew  78 Kuhn Thomas Samuel  42, 86, 240 Kundera Milan  70

Index

Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm  24 Iljicz Uljanow  150 Levasseur Martine  266 Lévinas Emmanuel  167, 274 Levi Primo  94, 238 Levi-​Strauss Claude  238 Lévy Bernard-​Henri  19, 20, 74 Lipovetsky Giles  22, 128–​133, 192 Lis Renata  47 Lowe Andrew  267 Lukács Gyorgy  57, 58 Lukes Steven  138 Lyotard Jean-​François  22, 25, 63, 77, 90–​96, 113–​115,  133 Marcuse Herbert  84 Macherey Pierre  12 MacIntyre Alisdair  284, 285 Madore Joël  167 Mallarmé Stéphane  7, 24, 64, 65, 87, 108, 248, 279–​281, 305 Mannet Geoffroy  212, 218 Marchart Oliver  105 Marcuse Herbert  84 Markiewicz Henryk  52 Marx  12–​14, 17, 19, 99, 110, 111, 127, 143, 149–​152, 154–​156, 159, 174, 181, 182, 205, 241 Marlowe Christopher  48 Mauerne Turquet de  100 Mauger Gérard  266 Maupassant Guy de  69 Mauss Marcel  217 May Todd  109, 165, 260 McSweeney John  235 Mead George Herbert  61 Meillassoux Quentin  281 Melehy Hassan  237 Merleau-​Ponty Maurice  42, 163 Michaud Yves  303 Miliband Ralph  125 Milner Jean-​Claude  190, 279

335

Germaine Necker  43 Monroe Jonathan  74 Montaigne Michel Eyquem de  62 Moreau Frédéric  285 Moreiras Alberto  161 Mościcki Paweł  227 Mouffe Chantal  116–​118, 122, 161, 261 Mounier Jean-​Pierre  209 Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus  268 Munro André  110 Nabokov Vladimir  25, 251, 286–​298 Nancy Jean-​Luc  86, 139, 153, 154, 157, 233, 272, 273, 304 Negri Antonio  17, 141, 150, 160, 161, 163, 164, 230 Neveu Catherine  103 Newton Isaac  259 Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm  24, 69, 115, 130, 156 Nordmann Charlotte  104, 105, 207, 215, 216, 218, 272 Norval Aletta J.  110 Freiherr von Hardenberg  68 Nycz Ryszard  299 Orr Leonard  146 Ortega y Gasset José  28, 56, 57, 270 Orwell George  155 Panagia David  37, 61, 136, 154, 223, 276 Parker Andrew  52 Pascal Blaise  108 Pasquier Renaud  110, 303 Passeron Jean-​Claud  215, 220, 254, 255, 266 Paz Maurice  170 Pelletier Caroline  156 Peroni Michel  203, 219 Peterson Richard A.  267, 294

336

Index

Picasso Pablo Ruiz  73, 92 Pierpont Claudia Roth  143, 196 Pierssens Michel  50 Pinard Adolphe  47, 48 Plot Martin  42 Płuciennik Jarosław  90, 91 Poliak Claude  266 Portnoy Aleksander  143, 144 Potte-​Bonneville Mathieu  230 Prado Carlos Gonzales  284 Premat Christophe  133 Prochasson Christophe  181 Proudhon Pierre-​Joseph  174 Proust Marcel  36, 37, 51, 59, 92, 119, 305 Pudal Bernard  266 Racine Jean-​Baptiste  252 Rancière Jacques  9–​25, 27–​30, 32, 34–​36, 38–​40, 42, 44–​46, 48, 50–​ 56, 58–​60, 62, 64, 66–​70, 76, 77, 80–​82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92–​100, 102–​112, 114, 117–​119, 123–​127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138–​143, 147–​159, 161–​185, 187–​196, 198, 200–​205, 207, 208, 212, 216–​224, 226, 227, 230, 232–​235, 237–​240, 242, 245–​249, 251–​253, 256, 258–​ 263, 268–​280, 282–​284, 294–​296, 299–​305 Rawls John  120, 121, 140, 185 Reeve C. D. C.  198 Harmenszoon van Rijn  259 Renault Emmanuel  142 Renaut Alain  16, 19 Revel Jean-​François  17 Ricoeur Paul  284 Riesman David  131 Rimbaud Arthur  20, 305 Rioufol Ivan  148, 149 Rockhill Gabriel  40, 44, 45, 52, 194, 235, 276

Rogger-​Andréucci Christine van  74 Rohruber Julian  30 Rosanvallon Pierre  150, 193 Ross Kristin  15, 66, 109, 157, 200 Roth Philip Milton  25, 137, 143–​147, 195, 196 Rousseau Jean-​Jacques  202 Roussel Albert  248 Rouvroy de Saint-​Simon Klaudiusz Henryk 179 Ruby Christian  21, 96, 151 Ruitenberg Claudia W.  156 Sabot Philippe  302 Saint-​Martin Louis Claude de  264 Saint-​Simon Henri de  179, 181, 182 Salles Denis  103 San Juan Juan Huart de  28 Sankey Howard  42 Sartori Giovanni  187, 190 Sartre Jean-​Paul Charles Aymard  20, 22, 30, 31, 44, 119, 205, 211, 279, 283 Sauvagnargues Anne  35 Schelling Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von  44, 85, 86 Schiller Johann Christoph Friedrich von  25, 75, 82–​86, 88–​90 Schmitt Carl  116 Scholem Gershom  143 Schönberg Arnold  65 Schopenhauer Arthur  69 Schreiber David  111, 150 Schroeder William  13 Scott Joan Wallach  200 Searle John Rogers  300 Searles George J.  146 Segol Noémie  152 Sevilla Jean  16 Shirani Takashi  24 Simon Henri de  133 Slade Andrew  92

Index

Slonim Vera  288 Sloterdijk Peter  125, 126, 171, 218, 224, 240 Sorel Julian  285 Sowa Jan  186, 187 Spinoza Benedykt, właśc. Baruch de Spinoza 24, 259 Stamp Richard  30, 98 Standing Guy  103 Stiegler Bernard  224 Stoneman Ethan  276 Strindberg August  69 Sutton Robert P.  183 Swenson James  180, 301 Tanke Joseph  85, 135 Tardy Fabien  123, 152, 170 Taylor Charles  121, 290 Thiher Allen  290 Thoreau Henry David  283 Tockeville Alexis de  19 Todd Jane Marie  109, 200 Tomes Arnaud  135 Toscano Alberto  219 Toulmin Stephen  61, 62 Trapiello Anrés  28 Valéry Paul  41 Van de Weyer Jean-​Sylvain  257 Vattimo Giani  115

337

Verdes-​Leroux Jeannine  215 Vermeren Patrice  12 Vernon Eliseo  266 Verstraete Ghislain  253 Vibert Stéphane  110, 221 Vico Giambattista  44, 68 Vivier Christine  152 Wacquant Loic  212, 213 Wald Lasowski Aliocha  194 Watts Philip  52 Ważyk Adam  73, 74 Weber Max  61 Wells Herbert George  290 Welsch Wolfgang  29, 78, 114 White Hayden  237, 284 Willis Paul  267 Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann  113, 114 Woolf Virginia  36, 37, 51, 59, 271, 301, 305 Wordsworth William  305 Zeidler-​Janiszewska Anna  114 Zepke Stephen  92 Žižek Slavoj  23, 24, 99, 106, 139–​143, 152, 157, 187, 259 Zola Émile Édouard Charles Antoine  51, 69, 88, 301

Cross-Roads Studies in Culture, Literary Theory, and History Edited by Ryszard Nycz Vol.

1

Małgorzata Budzowska: Phaedra – Ethics of Emotions in the Tragedies of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. Translated by Adriana Grzelak-Krzymianowska. 2012.

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2

Andrzej Zawadzki: Literature and Weak Thought. Translated by Stanley Bill (in consultation with Benjamin Koschalka). 2013.

Vol.

3

Maria Janion: Hero, Conspiracy, and Death: The Jewish Lectures. Translated by Alex Shannon. 2014.

Vol.

4

Grzegorz Grochowski / Ryszard Nycz (eds.): From Modern Theory to a Poetics of Experience. Polish Studies in Literary History and Theory. 2014.

Vol.

5

Anna Nasiłowska (ed.): Wisława Szymborska´s poetry. Choice of Essays. Translated by Karolina Krasuska and J drzej Burszta. 2015.

Vol.

6

Zdzisław Łapi ski (ed.): “Miłosz Like the World”. Poet in the Eyes of Polish Literary Critics. Translated by Grzegorz Czemiel. 2015.

Vol.

7

Włodzimierz Bolecki: A World Apart by Gustaw Herling. Translated by Agnieszka Kołakowska. 2015.

Vol.

8

Jakub Momro: Literature of Consciousness. Samuel Beckett – Subject – Negativity. Translated by Jan Pytalski and Cain Elliott. 2015.

Vol.

9

Katarzyna Majbroda: Clifford Geertz’s Interpretive Anthropology. Between Text, Experience and Theory. Translated by Izabela Kołbon, Zuzanna Buchowska and Olga Ranus. 2016.

Vol.

10 Michał Głowi ski: Myths in Disguise. Translated by Grzegorz Czemiel and Stanley Bill. 2018.

Vol.

11 Mikołaj Golubiewski: The Persona of Czesław Miłosz. Authorial Poetics, Critical Debates, Reception Games. 2018.

Vol.

12 Adam Dziadek: Somatic Criticism Project. Translated by Lindsay Davidson. 2018.

Vol.

13 Piotr Sobolczyk: The Worldview, the Trope, and the Critic. Critical Discourses on Miron Białoszewski. Translated by Jan Burzy ski. 2018.

Vol.

14 Małgorzata Czermi ska: The Autobiographical Triangle. Witness, Confession, Challenge. 2019.

Vol.

15 Krzysztof Trybu : Romantic Memory. Studies from the Past and Present. Translated by Klara Naszkowska. 2019.

Vol.

16 Piotr de Bo cza Bukowski / Magda Heydel (eds.): Polish Translation Studies in Action. Concepts – Methodologies – Applications. A Reader. 2019.

Vol.

17 Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz / Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik / Beata niecikowska (eds.): Understanding Misunderstanding. Vol.1: Cross-Cultural Translation. 2019.

Vol.

18 Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz / Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik / Beata niecikowska (eds.): Understanding Misunderstanding. Vol. 2: Artistic Practices. 2019.

Vol.

19 Wojciech Lig za: World under Revision. The Poetry of Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Mikołaj Golubiewski. 2019.

Vol.

20 Paweł Dybel: Psychoanalysis – the Promised Land? The History of Psychoanalysis in Poland 1900–1989. Part I. The Sturm und Drang Period. Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the Polish Lands during the Partitions 1900–1918. Translated by Tomasz Biero . 2019.

Vol.

21 Kamila Budrowska: Writers, Literature and Censorship in Poland. 1948–1958. Translated by Paul A. Vickers. 2019.

Vol.

22 Krzysztof Trybu (ed.): The Literature of Polish Romanticism in Its European Contexts. 2020.

Vol.

23 Maryla Hopfinger: Literature and Media. After 1989. Translated by Andrzej Wojtasik. 2020.

Vol.

24 Ewa Bobrowska: UCI Critical Theory and Contemporary Art Practice: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruce Nauman, and Others. With a Prologue by Georges Van Den Abbeele. 2020.

Vol.

25 Maciej Nowak: On an Electric Arc. Andrzej Bobkowski Writing. Translated by Mikołaj Golubiewski and Jan Burzy ski. 2020.

Vol.

26 Tomasz Garbol: After the Fall. On the Writings of Czesław Miłosz. Translated by Mikołaj Golubiewski and Jan Burzy ski. 2020.

Vol.

27 Agnieszka Kluba: The Prose Poem As a (Non)Genre. A Polish Case Study. Translated by Jakob Ziguras. 2021.

Vol.

28 Beata niecikowska: Transcultural Haiku. Polish History of the Genre. Translated by Justyn Hunia. 2021.

Vol.

29 Pauls Daija / Benedikts Kalna s (eds.): A New History of Latvian Literature. The Long Nineteenth Century. 2022.

Vol.

30 Barbara Englender: Photo-Graphemicality. Photography and Poetry at the Turn of the 21st Century. 2022.

Vol.

31 Beata niecikowska: A Stab in the Ear. Poetics of Sound in Futurism and Dadaism. Translated by Grzegorz Czemiel. 2023.

Vol.

32 Jerzy Franczak: Wandering Words. Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature. 2023.

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