The Politics of Bodies: Philosophical Emancipation With and Beyond Rancière 2020941335, 9781538143568, 9781538143575, 9781538143582

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The Politics of Bodies

Reinventing Critical Theory Series Editors: Gabriel Rockhill, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University Jennifer Ponce de León, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania The  Reinventing Critical Theory series publishes cutting-edge work that seeks to reinvent critical social theory for the 21st century. It serves as a platform for new research in critical philosophy that examines the political, social, historical, anthropological, psychological, technological, religious, aesthetic and/or economic dynamics shaping the contemporary situation. Books in the series provide alternative accounts and points of view regarding the development of critical social theory, put critical theory in dialogue with other intellectual traditions around the world, and/or advance new, radical forms of pluralist critical theory that contest the current hegemonic order. Commercium: Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View Brian Milstein Resistance and Decolonization Amílcar Cabral—Translated by Dan Wood Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe: From Weimar to the Euro Edited by Poul F. Kjaer and Niklas Olsen Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency Joshua Ramey Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish The Invention of the Visible: The Image in Light of the Arts Patrick Vauday—Translated by Jared Bly Metaphors of Invention and Dissension Rajeshwari S. Vallury Technology, Modernity and Democracy Edited by Eduardo Beira and Andrew Feenberg A Critique of Sovereignty Daniel Loick—Translated by Amanda DeMarco

Democracy and Relativism: A Debate Cornelius Castoriadis—Translated by John V. Garner Democracy in Spite of the Demos: From Arendt to the Frankfurt School Larry Alan Busk The Politics of Bodies: Philosophical Emancipation with and beyond Rancière Laura Quintana—Translated by Rosario Casas

The Politics of Bodies Philosophical Emancipation with and beyond Rancière

Laura Quintana

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by Laura Quintana All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941335 ISBN 978-1-5381-4356-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5381-4357-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5381-4358-2 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Pablo and Feliza, for the inexhaustible desire

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction1 PART I:  RETHINKING THE EMANCIPATION OF BODIES TODAY

21

1. Mapping the Practices of Emancipation 1.1. A Cartography of Possibilities 1.2. Intellectual Emancipation and Political Subjectivization/ Dissensus and Disagreement 1.2.1. Everyday Displacements in the Web of Experience 1.2.2. Scenes of Disagreement 1.2.3. Different Strategies and Passages—Singularity of the Approach

23 24

2. Intellectual Emancipation as the Torsion of a Body 2.1. Torsions of Bodies 2.1.1. The Separation of Gaze and Hands 2.1.2. The Interstice and the Materiality of Words 2.1.3. The Languages of Bodies 2.1.4. The Potency of Bodies 2.2. Torsion as Conversion of a Body 2.2.1. An Economy of Freedom 2.2.2. Out of Place 2.3. Effects

45 48 48 54 60 63 65 66 69 72

ix

30 31 34 36

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Contents

3. Consensualism and the Dispossession of Bodies 3.1. Neoliberalism, Dispossession, and Depoliticization 3.1.1. Neoliberalism as Ideology and Dispossession by Accumulation 3.1.2. Neoliberalism as a Form of Rationality and Its Effects on Dedemocratization 3.2. Consensual Logic 3.2.1. The Community of Consensus 3.2.2. The Law of Consensus 3.2.3. Comprehensive Inclusion and Its Immunitarian Facet 3.2.4. Total Exhibition and the Reduction of Heterogeneity 3.2.5. The Necessity of Time and the Dispossession of Bodies PART II:  REINVENTIONS OF THE COMMON 4. Disagreement and the Division of the Social Body in Today’s World 4.1. Disagreement 4.1.1. The Inevitable Miscount 4.1.2. The Manifestation of the Wrong 4.1.3. Political Conflict 4.1.4. Subjectivization 4.1.5. The Arguments of Disagreement 4.2. Against the Grain of Consensus: The Demand for Buen Vivir (Good Living)

79 82 84 88 97 100 101 102 106 110 115 117 122 125 127 130 134 140 149

5. Institutions of Disagreement, Institutions of the Common? Extending Emancipatory Intervals beyond an Organic Social Body163 5.1. An Unfeasible Anti-Institutionalism? 165 5.2. Excessive Democracy and Autonomy of Emancipation Practices169 5.3. Emancipatory Institutions? 177 5.4. Institutions of the Common? 181 5.4.1. Beyond the Res Publica 182 5.4.2. How to Build the Common in the Midst of Conflict? 186 5.4.3. Instituting the Common 197 5.5. Institution, Conflict, Violences 202



Contents xi

6. Image, Times, Bodies 6.1. Excessive Reportage 6.2. Aesthetic Logic and Its Reinventions of Bodies 6.2.1. Inexpressive Body, Fragmented Bodies, Unfindable Body 6.2.2. Bodies at the Limit of What They Can Do: Politics in the Films of Pedro Costa 6.3. Another Image of Time: Heterochronic Bodies 6.3.1. Memories in Conflict: The Possibilities of Docufiction 6.3.2. Bodies That Challenge Their Victimization: Nicolás Rincón-Gillé’s Campo hablado (“The Spoken Countryside”)

209 212 215

Epilogue: Politics, Bodies, Affects

239

Works Cited

245

217 222 226 227 229

Index259 Author Bio

267

Acknowledgments

This book, written over several months, gathers reflections of many years, fostered by stimulating face-to-face or online conversations with friendscolleagues with whom I have discussed these issues. I specifically want to thank Etienne Tassin, Anders Fjeld, Carlos Manrique, Pablo Jaramillo, Gustavo Chirolla, Catalina Cortés-Severino, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Diego Paredes, Alhena Fernández, Luciana Cadahia, Amalia Boyer, Andrea Lehner, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, and several of my master’s and PhD students over the last four years. My gratitude also to the project “Social Movements and Construction of the Common in Colombia Today,” financed by the School of Social Sciences of the Universidad de los Andes. The fieldwork carried out during the project and the discussions with the research group enriched and helped situate the book’s formulations, particularly chapters 4 and 5. I also want to thank Rosario Casas for her careful reading of the manuscript in the process of translation. Her close attention to the text saved me a few embarrassments and guaranteed a precise translation job. Finally, I want to thank the Universidad de los Andes for funding the translation of this book. Translator’s Note: When available, English translations of Rancière’s and other authors’ works have been used. In a few cases, they have been slightly modified, and reasons for such modification have been provided. In the case of texts available only in Spanish or French, I have done the translations.

xiii

Introduction

The distant reality every day questions me like an unknown traveler who wakes me up in the middle of the journey. —Nikola Madzirov, “I Don’t Know,” 2011, 19

What happens when a body1 questions the identity, the place, the positions, the functions it has been assigned and exposes itself to other vital experiences and possibilities? What is at stake when a collective of bodies confronts certain regulatory dispositifs in order to demand that other forms of life and ways of being with others be allowed to appear and be recognized as equally valid? How would it be possible to extend these egalitarian transformations through institutional designs that multiply and enhance them? To what extent do those transformations require other imaginaries and forms of perception such as those fostered by experimental practices with images, gestures, words, and affects? These crucial questions for contemporary reflection on emancipation practices are also central to Jacques Rancière’s thought, and they are the questions that shall be addressed in this book. As we can see, these are questions that revolve around the issue of the body and inquire into what a corporeality can do when emancipated, and into what bodies can do when they come together in emancipation practices. Undoubtedly, a key concern of contemporary ethical-political reflection is the possibility that once corporealities recognize themselves as inscribed in and shaped by multiple power and domination dispositifs, they can reverse those subjections and transform themselves.2 What does it mean for a body to be shaped by social practices and to what extent is this so? How do those practices affect it and how can it have a “critical” impact on them? In other words, the problem appears to be that of how a corporeality that understands itself as shaped by multiple power mechanisms can de-subject itself from 1

2

Introduction

its incorporations, alter itself, and, together with others, eventually produce transformations in the common world. Brian Massumi (2002, 3) gives substance to this issue and to its inherently problematic nature when he argues that certain theories of positionality prevalent in cultural studies3 make it impossible to think the qualitative transformations of a body, its mobility, and ability to feel this movement, given that it can exceed social subjections in unforeseeable or unexpected ways. This is a dead end, which as Eve Sedgwick (2003, 123–51) pointed out, could even have a paranoid effect on critical theory, always alerting it to track the configuration of new power mechanisms, which would somehow keep bodies trapped in the reiteration of their subjections, instead of delving into the affective territories that circulate among them and the unforeseeable ways in which they could be transformed. Rancière too has addressed this issue in his works, albeit based on other considerations. From his first critiques of Althusser and Bourdieu, underpinned by his remarkable archival research, to his most recent questioning of the critical and post-critical dispositif, Rancière has been interested in critically discussing the problematic aspects of those philosophical and social science perspectives that prevent us from considering the unforeseeable and incalculable ways in which bodies can reinvent themselves from the positions, roles, and practices they are subjected to. This impediment arises in two situations: first, when emancipation and critique are conceived in “demystifying” terms, as the possibility of seeing ideological threads that were not apparent and that can only be seen by those who have acquired certain knowledge, without, however, being able to detach themselves completely from the naturalizations of ideology, given the pre-reflective embodiments that constituted them. The second situation involves those critical perspectives that tend toward a totalizing or closed, even apocalyptical, logic of the social field (which Rancière sees in contemporary thinkers such as Guy Debord, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek), according to which the hegemony of contemporary capitalism in our globalized world would have blocked the possibility of any resistance to its power dynamics, given that its regulations are disseminated throughout both the molar level of institutional organization and management and the molecular level of the forms of life, the everydayness of bodies (Rancière 2017a, 38). These practices that govern gestures, affects, rhythms, practices driven by the ambition of productivity and successful performance, characterized by their frantic pace in response to the demand of constant innovation and self-improvement of the entrepreneurial subject and by logics that wipe out all difference, seem to have also appropriated the desire to be in a different way, to transgress the imposed boundaries, to actually change the forms of life, and, therefore, the very possibility of any resistance and de-subjection. Consequently, there would be no exceedance: any attempt at rupture would



Introduction 3

already take place within the spectacular, consumerist, and commodity order that it seeks to overturn. The only alternative would seem to be the recognition of the ideological mechanisms operating in late capitalist consumer societies, and, with it, a disenchanted understanding of the inescapability of an overarching, all-capturing, closed rationality, and its subsequent denunciation in its multiple and possible reinventions (Rancière 2007a, 2008a, 30–55). In view of these perspectives of critical theory that focus on the issue of the embodiment of subjections, approaching it from the “dense black cloud” (Rancière 2017a, 38) of a sort of nihilism, Rancière has challenged the critical dispositif that they mobilize, whether inadvertently or not. More specifically, he has sought to rethink critical activity far removed from dispositifs of inversion (according to which what is considered essential proves to be apparent), demystification (in which that considered real and true reveals itself as mythical or ideological), humanism (in which alienated human capacities are reappropriated), and liberation from an all-capturing global power (cf. Chambers 2013, 133–56). Going against the grain of these assumptions, Rancière has stated that emancipation is neither a movement toward illumination, in which we manage to see what did not let itself be seen, nor a process of knowledge and acknowledgment of what we did not know, nor the reappropriation of a capacity that had become separated from itself (Rancière 2009d, 15), nor the possibility of escaping “the clutches of a sort of octopus-like monster” (Rancière 2016c, 61). In challenging those assumptions of critical theory, Rancière has emphasized that forms of domination operate within “a heterogeneous combination of elements and arrangements” so that “the ways of adhering to or distancing oneself from them are also heterogeneous combinations of affects and forms of consciousness” (Rancière 2017b, 19). This means that they are always affective, corporeal forms of awareness. Thus, to think that subjects can be completely subjected by their dominations, captured by them in their prereflective convictions, is oversimplification. At the same time, Rancière has insisted on the fact that an emancipatory movement is, above all, an affective movement that pushes one to “seek another way of life,” different from the habitual one, on the basis of the affirmation of the power of bodies to reconfigure themselves, of their plasticity. Surprisingly, commentators of his work have not dwelt sufficiently on the fact that emancipation involves this affective and reflexive movement of corporeality, although Rancière has emphasized the issue on several occasions. For example, in one of his interviews, Rancière points out: Emancipation does not entail change in terms of knowledge, but in terms of position of bodies. This is why I have insisted on the “aesthetic” dimension of the problem of emancipation. However, “aesthetic” does not refer here to a theory of the beautiful or of art, but to a mode of inscription in a sensible universe.

4

Introduction

In the 19th century, being a worker means being equipped with a certain body, defined by capacities and incapacities and by belonging to a certain perceptual universe. Emancipation is a rupture with that corporeality, for example, a dissociation between gaze and hands. (Rancière 2009a, 575–76)

Thus, emancipation is, first and foremost, a rupture with a corporeality, with a way of experiencing the body, which brings about a transformation of its position, that is, an inscription in another sensible universe, other than the one assigned to it (in another distribution of the sensible, in other economies of affective forces, in other forms of gestuality), in practices of corporeal reflectivity that also produce another way of seeing the world, of being affected by it, and of judging it. What seems to be at stake here, then, is an alteration of the way in which bodies take on what they can, in the way they experience their capacities and incapacities. Ultimately, this implies a qualitative alteration of their mobility, which is also an alteration of their power, their potency, their desire, and their affects.4 Thanks to this, it also means a transformation of their understanding of the world and of the field of what is conceivably possible in it. These transformations have nothing to do with a full excedence and transgression of subjections, nor with their altered reiteration or parodic mimesis, which, in the end, would imply that “we only ever experience and reexperience the habitual body” (Noland 2009, 213). Much less are they related to a distanced judgment regarding a situation that might be finally recognized in its reality. Rancière’s invitation to rethink emancipation involves reconsidering both the relationship between a corporeality and the subjections that configure it in a way that is not saturated, stable, or homogeneous, and the manner in which forms of alteration can be deployed on the basis of those subjections. More specifically, this means reconsidering how these subjections may be countered through the singular practices of corporealities, as well as through collective actions that could have de-subjecting and transformative effects on the forms of social regulation. This also points to thinking how these possibilities of emancipation can be inscribed in transformed institutions that expand alternative forms of relation among bodies. This entails seeking, in Rancière’s thought, a certain understanding of corporeality and of the ways in which it can be emancipated through singular and collective expressions, with relatable and distinguishable effects. My objective is, then, to show that Rancière invites us to rethink emancipation on the basis of the body and of another understanding of the body (other, with respect to an objectivized, naturalized view, but also with respect to certain constructivist and culturalist understandings). More precisely, I aim to show that Rancière’s thought allows for an aesthetic-cartographic comprehension of the body and of emancipation that also influences his



Introduction 5

understanding of forms of collective action, in terms of political subjectivization, as well as of the institutional devices through which those actions might be extended and multiplied. Therefore, I argue that Rancière’s thought contributes to the creation of “new idioms for contemporary critical agency,” to put it in the terms used by Athanasiou and Butler (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 27)—“new idioms,” with respect to the traditional and post-critical dispositif referred to above. But they are also “new” with respect to the liberal grammar of the “free, sovereign individual,” which, as Nikolas Rose’s work (1989, 1996) has shown, is also the subject in control of itself (responsible for its self-fulfillment, selfnurturing, self-regulation) of liberalism and neoliberalism, and, in Rancière’s terms, the depoliticized subject of consensualism,5 which tends to inhibit dissensual transformations. This is a subject that embodies the identity fixations produced by consensualism and its marginalizing boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the capable and the incapable individual, as well as a subject that inhibits its corporeal plasticity and its exposure to other bodies, by attaching itself to certain forms of vigorexia, in line with the neoliberal subject’s penchant for fitness (Cano 2015, 23–24). As I aim to demonstrate, Rancière’s way of thinking the forms of emancipation (individual and collective) challenges that subject and, with it, the humanist dispositif of person, with its rigid boundaries between the genuinely human, rational, capable of articulate language, and the bare life of a being doomed to mere survival,6 to impotence, or to the dispossession of its capacities for agency. Thus, Rancière’s formulations regarding what I have broadly called here a “politics of bodies” can also be significant for reflecting on political agency today, in the times of late capitalism and its ways of dispossessing those it marginalizes, includes through exclusion, or abandons (cf. Biehl 2005; Povinelli 2011; Bales 2012; Butler and Athanasiou 2013). Drawing on the thought of Rancière, I seek to propose forms of political action capable of confronting those dispossessions and of inscribing themselves in other possible institutions and other aesthetic languages that disrupt the order of what is assumed as a given. SITUATING THE REFLECTION Let us then locate these issues in certain contemporary circumstances, in order to also situate the concerns that affect me and lead me to embark on this endeavor of thinking with Rancière, and, at times, also beyond his formulations. On the one hand, a constellation of phenomena in today’s global capitalist societies seem to evince a series of dead ends for critical agency; and, on the other, constant forms of dispossession of territories, of the labor

6

Introduction

of bodies, of their mobility occur in these societies and the margins they produce, as suggested above. These two tendencies intersect and influence each other, thus raising unsettling questions regarding the abovementioned link between emancipation and corporeality. The suspicion that critical agency is currently trapped and inhibited seems to resonate in the minds of many “progressive” spirits who have been clearly disturbed by recent events: Brexit, Trump’s victory, anti-immigrant policies in many European Union countries, and the success of radical right-wing options in many parts of the world, among others. In view of such events, those enlightened consciences have hastened to proclaim the turn toward the world of post-truth, as the consummation of politics turned spectacle. In my view, this turn points, instead, to the strength acquired in our consensual societies by immunitarian narratives and social practices7 that have had deleterious effects on politics and have been fueled rather than countered by consensualism. In my case, and in that of many Colombians, the most disturbing recent political event was the defeat of the “yes” vote in the 2016 plebiscite to ratify the peace agreements signed by the national government and the FARC, after four years of complex negotiations and over fifty years of war. The initial readings of this event provided significant “data” in support of the abovementioned suspicion regarding critical agency today, at least in the Colombian context that I am writing from: A little over 13 million Colombians voted “yes” or “no.” But more than 21 million did not vote either way [. . .]. It seemed as if everything was about to change, but over 21 million Colombian men and women decided not to vote, thus exercising their right to perpetuate an uncertain and bleak present. They simply decided to exercise their right to yell out a deafening silence, thus turning democracy into the empire of abstentionists, of those who speak without being there, of those who express their existence by making themselves invisible, of those who hide behind a transparent wall against which everything crashes and crumbles, especially hope. (Pablo Gentili 2016)

As any political scientist in Colombia would agree, abstentionism is not exceptional, evental, or surprising. Yet it could be, in the case of a vote aimed at ratifying the approval and subsequent implementation of agreements that might contribute to transforming the conditions of social inequality and violence that have historically determined people’s distrust of representative institutions and government policies, as well as of the influence their vote could have on them. It is fairly reasonable to say that such distrust could not be undermined by an agreement between an administration that had showed little concern for social policies that affect the lives of the people, except for the peace process itself, and a guerrilla group that had ended up causing so



Introduction 7

much grief among the population through its “para-state” institutions. It is true that the process was debated during the four years of negotiation and that it indirectly led to forms of participation of other sectors, like victims organizations, collectives, and grassroots movements that influenced the negotiation agenda more or less directly and significantly pluralized the Colombian political space. Despite all this, it suddenly and shockingly became evident that it was impossible to break the circle: distrust of the political system (with its state and “para-state” institutions) could not be moved to influence the conditions that cause and reproduce it—at least not by a mechanism inherent to that same representative system. This erosion of representative democracy can be interpreted on the basis of more global phenomena, in line with what Wendy Brown has called the “de-democratization” of democracy in the face of certain dynamics of contemporary capitalism. According to Brown, the erosion of liberal representative democracies has much to do with the increasing merging of the state and interest groups, of which the former becomes a “representative.” This can be observed in public policies (environmental-, energy-, and labor-related), among others, which end up supporting or even subsidizing large corporations and sectors of capital, to the detriment of social actors and local communities in precarious conditions, which are subjected to a series of public policies in which those affected by them do not have much say. Likewise, such erosion is evident in elections, “which have become circuses of marketing and management” (Brown 2011, 47), in which very little importance is given to a carefully thought-out decision regarding government programs and plans or legislation, which should serve as the basis of freedom of election, according to the model of liberal representative democracy. Instead, government agendas are marketed as products whose consumption is promoted through easily remembered affective slogans. Furthermore, the erosion of representation is markedly evinced in the way information is produced in the mainstream media, which prioritizes events according to certain economic interests and, in doing so, jeopardizes freedom of the press and its duty as political watchdog. However, what is most threatening, according to Brown, is something crucial for critical agency: the manner in which all of these practices are aligned with a neoliberal rationality or, to say it with Foucault, with certain techniques of government that shape the private life and daily decisions of persons, conceived as “innovative,” “creative,” and “entrepreneurial ‘strategies,’ ” aimed at optimizing the subject “as producer of capital” (Castro-Gómez 2010, 208). The most disturbing consequence would be for this ethopolitics, as Nikolas Rose has called it, rooted in the discourses of “self-care” and “self-­ actualization” (Rose 1989, 1996), to result in an extremely individualizing politics capable of blocking the emergence of any common power whatsoever.

8

Introduction

If this mentality were to be fully incorporated, there would no longer be any interest in intervening in the world together with others, or in resisting certain forms of control that, in fact, already seem to have been quite internalized. Brown’s considerations show how certain economical-political mechanisms that have become hegemonic in the globalized world can contribute to the depoliticization of democratic public spaces. However, Brown goes a step further: in her view, this depoliticization also affects citizen action and the understanding of what is at stake today in the very notion of citizenship in its political dimension. That is to say, conceiving the “citizen” not as a mere subject of rights but as a political subject whose power of decision in the common world is recognized, or which the subject bestows upon itself when said recognition is denied. Depoliticization can affect the political subject so much that Brown even doubts that, in the current conditions, subjects could be capable of constituting themselves as critical citizens or political subjects that fight for their emancipation. In her words, “Today, however, it is hard to imagine what could compel humans to the task of ruling themselves or successfully contesting the powers by which they are dominated” (Brown 2011, 56). While sharing parts of Brown’s critical assessment, I believe that some of the assumptions underlying this statement are rather problematic. Specifically, I consider that mistrust regarding the critical capacities of common people (observable in a critical position like Bourdieu’s, or a post-critical one, like Žižek’s) deserves to be challenged, and with it, the assumption that the task of the critical intellectual is to unveil the power networks that subject people without their being able to see them. Rancière’s formulations have been very significant for my endeavor to situate my thought, since his claim that such assumptions contribute to the forms of domination they are attempting to denounce provides very productive elements to question those assumptions, which I shall call the “assumptions of the lettered spirits.”8 Before going on to the reasons why those assumptions ought to be questioned and explaining how they reproduce the dominations they “unveil,” it is important to consider a possible objection. Why question that mistrust regarding the critical or emancipatory capacities of citizens, if recent political events seem to show, once and again, that citizens are, in fact, rather uncritical and unemancipated? Indeed, the lettered spirits might well argue that said mistrust is further buttressed by another disturbing phenomenon, which is evident in many parts of the world and could be interpreted as concomitant with the depoliticization described by Brown: the appearance of extreme right-wing fronts, mobilized by unreflective discourses of stigmatization and hatred. Returning to the Colombian case discussed above, this was quite visible in the public discourse in favor of the “no” vote, which mobilized numerous distortions and rumors regarding the peace agreement, through a



Introduction 9

highly successful and aggressive media campaign. It made no difference that intellectuals and scholars, students, and government officials explained once and again, with careful arguments or light pedagogical campaigns, that those were nothing more than biased misreadings of the peace agreement. But, why did those “more reasonable” arguments wielded here and there by all sorts of lettered spirits fail to matter? What does this tell us about critical agency in today’s world? These are certainly questions that could be raised in order to think about different yet convergent situations around the world, which have involved both figures and positions that do not seem very reasonable in the light of economic, political, and social arguments, such as Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the vote in favor of Brexit in Great Britain. Most likely, the lettered spirits will answer those questions by insisting on the blindness of people who fail to see the powers they are subjected to and the lies produced in the post-truth regime. But I believe it is necessary to stop blaming subjects for their blindness or lack of knowledge and start considering the issue at stake here in more relational terms. Particularly, I consider it crucial to ask whether the formation of certain irreflective, uncritical, unemancipated attitudes has to do more with the emergence of a certain immunitarian, affective, and judgmental attitude that closes bodies off to contingency and to their relationality, though not inevitably, than with ignorance, naivety, irrationality, or intractable pre-reflective embodiments. It could be thought that said immunitarian attitude has to do with the entrenchment of narratives that limit the field of the possible, that bury other ways of being, different spaces and times, by dispossessing bodies of their possibilities, while also closing them off to their own vulnerability and dependence—narratives that permeate the forms of precarization into which bodies are thrown. Perhaps those bodies that act in order to vindicate forms of equality and to create different bonds among themselves are bodies that also expose themselves to their fragility and dependence, in order to challenge the conditions of their precarity, while also contesting their incapacitating effects. These claims have to do mainly with demanding conditions that, as Judith Butler (2015) says, make life livable in its complex relationality and dependence: dependence on others, on mutual care, on certain social requirements, on human and nonhuman interrelations.9 Going beyond Rancière, perhaps it would be possible to think that these bodies struggling for forms of equality show that life takes place within a matrix of relations that entail being exposed to others, as well as seamless crossings among the animal, the human, nature, and technologies, which allow for the expression of a common power. It is thus a question of affects, of desire, of the affirmation of a potency assumed as common, rather than of ignorance, inability to see, or lack of power to exceed subjections. As

10

Introduction

will become evident in many ways throughout this book, it is a question of desire to be differently, of affects that move our bodies. These affects do not necessarily lead to the voluntary servitude of the masses, nor to the destructive aggregation of their resentment; rather, they also make common action possible. Immunitarian politics mobilizes affects of closure and defensiveness on the basis of rumors that establish the other as a threatening identity: that of “guerrillas/outlaws/terrorists” who will impose Communism from their jungle hideout; that of “sexual perverts” that will destroy the traditional model of family; that of “illegal immigrants” of whom there are too many, who keep on reproducing, and who will destroy the purity of culture and raise indexes of misery and crime. In view of that politics of fear and stigmatization of the other, we need heterogeneous narratives that counter and dislocate the dogmatism of those rigid perspectives, while, at the same time, mobilizing other affects of the bodies: affects that have to do with life’s incompleteness, with that strangeness that invades all existences in their thrownness into a conflictive world in which the unforeseeable can occur. However, as I suggested before, there is a series of narratives and forms of subjectivity that prevent thinking that potency of bodies and the forms in which they could relate to one another in dissensual expressions. This includes not only the abovementioned critical and post-critical narratives and the subjects that these narratives have produced (the professional militant, the guilty intellectual, the lettered spirits) but also the liberal and neoliberal narratives of the subject that owns itself and the self-responsible individuals they have shaped. In fact, these liberal and neoliberal narratives underlie both the figure of the entrepreneurial subject—that self, shaped by the internalization of social conflicts, who seeks to resolve them not in collective spaces of dependence, but in spaces of distinction, like self-help, the gym, or sexual life (Cano 2015, 24)—and the figure of the autonomous, deliberative subject who believes that social conflicts can be resolved through the strength of the best argument deliberative rationality can offer. Both cases assume an understanding of the self that overlooks the manner in which subjects are configured and reconfigured through materialized practices of the bodies in their relations of affectation, care, and dependence. That is why the figure of the free, sovereign subject is incapable of dealing with the depoliticizing tendencies of neoliberalism. And it is incapable of doing so, because, in losing sight of the contingency and corporeality of public space and its subjects and the way in which it is permeated by affects, it also minimizes the conflictive nature of that same space.10 Now then, when it is no longer possible to let political conflict appear and be elaborated on, the differences that cannot be staged as common claims



Introduction 11

tend to become fixed as compact, social, identity differences (the marginalized, the victim, the dehumanized subject, the illegal alien, or the criminal), as intractable ethnic identifications, or to circulate as affects of hatred and resentment, which, in terms of Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 1987), can give rise to multiple forms of microfascism: “band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms [that] spare no one” (215); the “rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman” (228); those rumors arising from the world’s relationality, yet, at the same time, erasing it, thus denying the potential alteration that anybody is capable of. If the problem with these microfascisms is their potential to destroy the very interdependence of bodies from which they arise and then erase, then the problem with compact social identifications is that they also reproduce the forms of inequality that, in many cases, they seek to combat. Let us return to the Colombian case in order to see this more concretely. In view of the outcome of the plebiscite, many lettered spirits hastened to read the situation in terms of communicative rationality. From this perspective, the persons who were mobilized by slogans or rumors either closed their minds to the strength of the best reasons or were not prepared to receive them (due to naivety, lack of education, or certain religious beliefs). As Rancière has pointed out on many occasions, this argument presupposes intellectual inequality: that there are persons who are capable or incapable of acting in a reflective and critical manner due to lack of knowledge. However, in Colombia and contrary to the assumptions of the lettered spirits, bodies unenlightened by books of high culture or intricate legislation, or by sophisticated understandings of power and its subjection machines—bodies moved by enthusiasm and a nonreactive indignation, by the force of transposed words, as in songs of sorrow—organized themselves in order to discuss the peace agreement, its scope and limitations, without having to wait for the envoys of social aid organizations to explain the significance of the proposals.11 What moved those persons was not the strength of the best argument, but the desire to be differently, the acknowledgment of certain shared conditions of precarity, affects of fragility and solidarity, based on the recollection of stories of their own past failures. In comparing their past with their present, in taking those fragments of a failed past as inspiration to keep on acting, they challenged compact identifications such as that of the ignorant peasant or the poor who are incapable of reflecting on their problems and the reasons for them. Perhaps what is operating here in this acquired reflectivity is also desire, the desire of a body to be in a different manner, a desire that slackens and flattens out in settings that establish what is and what cannot be on the basis of an alleged “objective state” of things (with its rigid economic laws) that allows for some things and rules out others that can no longer be. Those bodies who

12

Introduction

abstain from voting have also become convinced of their impotence to change that state of things because they have come to believe that things cannot be other than what they are. In this book, I intend to show that consensual narratives, including those “critical” ones that function according to a vertical logic of inversion and that, in principle, are assumed to be nonconsensual, have a dispossessing effect on the possibilities of bodies. In their recent book, Dispossession (2013), Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou have reflected on this issue, connecting it to others that are also relevant for this book. Indeed, according to the authors, the forms of dispossession prevalent in globalized capitalism have to do with the manner in which bodies are “materialized” and “de-materialized” (Butler and ­Athanasiou 2013, 10), that is to say, fixed to a certain materiality but, at the same time, dislocated from the contingency of their situation and the interdependence of their bodies. This can happen in contexts in which colonial power was exercised on the basis of practices of subjection, vertical intervention, regulation, and abandonment,12 aimed at “controlling and appropriating the spatiality, mobility, affectivity, potentiality, and relationality of (neo-)colonized subjects” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 11). Today, in the context of contemporary capitalism, the forms of dispossession have to do mainly with practices of “violent appropriation of labor and the wearing out of laboring and non-laboring bodies” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 11), which give rise to economies of precarization (evident in job flexibilization, in cuts to public health and education systems), like those we see emerging everywhere in the world. It is, then, not only important but also urgent to consider how these diverse forms of dispossession of bodies also presuppose certain temporal narratives and forms of embodiment that, as stated above, dispossess bodies of their relationality, their mobility, their common potency to act together with others, and inhibit the desire for other forms of life and the transformative affects that lead bodies to alter themselves. But despite all this, bodies not only resist and endure (Povinelli 2011), they also reconfigure and reinvent other possibilities of life in common, on the basis of that persistence. EMANCIPATION AND CORPOREALITY IN RANCIÈRE Tying together the different threads presented thus far with respect to what I have called “a politics of bodies,” we can reflect on the manner in which emancipation practices, with their reinventions and struggles for equality, arise from and affect the forms in which corporealities can assume their possibilities and deal with the dispositifs that damage or depotentiate them. In this endeavor, I have relied fundamentally on Rancière, since I believe his thought revolves precisely around the question of what it is that bodies can do, due



Introduction 13

to the common potency that links them and to the political effects of this potency, with all of its implications, which will be unfolded throughout this book. Nevertheless, taking into account the increasing intellectual production on Rancière’s work, it is not at all evident that his thought gives rise to a politics of bodies. As a matter of fact, commentators of Rancière’s work have paid scarce attention to the issue of the body.13 This omission, however, is rather strange, given that Rancière defines political activity as “whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination” (Rancière 1999, 30; my emphasis). Likewise, in many of his interviews, Rancière has indicated that the question of the body is also crucial to think about the aesthetic dimension of politics, a central theme of his works, when, for example, he points out that “social emancipation was an aesthetic matter [. . .]. It is a matter of shaping for oneself a new body and a new sensorium” (Rancière 2008b, 10). Of course, these rapid references indicate that the issue of the body is polyvalent for Rancière. At stake here are considerations about a logic (characterized by the author as a police logic) that has conceived common life in terms of a well-organized social body with no supplement; reflections on how political actions disassemble that well-ordered body and are able to propose other configurations of the common, given that “a political collective is not, in actual fact, an organism or a communal body” (Rancière 2004c, 36); formulations that lead us to think that these actions involve a prior work of bodies on themselves, which allows them to re-experience their possibilities, thus exceeding the place they have been assigned; and proposals regarding the way in which these individual and collective displacements imply a different political imagination and a different imagination of the body (no longer that of an organic, representable body with given parts and functions, but a fragmented body without a determined expression), which Rancière weaves together with his historical analyses of the emergence of the aesthetic regime of art. In this sense, the different registers that could be used to approach the issue of the body in Rancière’s work are linked to the various registers in which he addresses politics (as politics of individual emancipation, as politics of art, as political subjectivization) and aesthetics (as a cartographic methodology that tracks distributions of the sensible, as a particular intervention in a certain sensible universe, as a regime of art), from the double level of intellectual emancipation and political emancipation in their differences and linkages. Furthermore, on the basis of the above, it is possible to infer that forms of emancipation act differently upon the body: in the case of forms of intellectual emancipation, by displacing an individual body from certain habitual positions and embodiments, in movements of disassembly and reconfiguration that affirm its potency, what it can do; and in the case of political

14

Introduction

emancipation, by dividing a common body that is assumed to be organic and unified, in order to assert existences, the right to existence and the capacity of subjects, other relations among bodies, and forms of organization that have no place in the well-assembled body of the social order, or that only have it when they are deemed impotent or incapable. At play, in both cases, are forms of disjunction and rearticulation, which may be thought on the basis of Rancière’s peculiar aesthetic-cartographic methodology, as well as the manifestation of a potency: the potency of what bodies can do through different practices and modes of intervention and the effects of that potency today. To trace that potency, its manifestations, and its effects, taking into account certain defining circumstances of today’s world is, then, putting it very succinctly, the objective of this book. In this sense, it aims to provide an original interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s thought, which emphasizes the centrality of the dimension of the body in his understanding of emancipation. But the book goes beyond Rancière because it situates his reflections in the context of contemporary discussions regarding the body and shows how they could contribute to them. By intervening in these debates, it mobilizes Rancière’s thought to describe forms of domination that characterize the world we live in, as well as emancipatory practices that counter them, in a way that exceeds what we can find in his work. THE PATH In pursuit of that objective, I discuss in chapter 1 the distinctive aestheticcartographic methodology developed in Rancière’s works, as well as some of its implications for this book. Among those implications are the affirmation of the heterogeneity of social formations, on the one hand, and, consequently, of forms of subjection and emancipation practices, on the other. This presupposes the instability and reversibility of the former, their connection with the latter, and their heterological and experimental nature. I am particularly interested in considering the way in which a thought like Rancière’s makes it possible to rethink singular movements of emancipation (of bodies on themselves), as well as collective ones (when diverse bodies interrelate and affect a social body). Likewise, I map the different dispositifs, strategies, and modes of intervention in which these practices can occur, as well as the crossings that can arise among them. Here, it is crucial to consider both the sensory, corporeal, and affective dimensions of these interventions and their effects on a given field of experience. Chapter 2 carries out a reflection on the manner in which emancipation arises from and affects forms of corporeality, their spaces, times, affects, and modes of experiencing, on the basis of a body’s work on itself in its relation



Introduction 15

with other bodies—what Rancière calls intellectual emancipation. I explore the ways in which his thought provides an aesthetic understanding of corporeality, according to which the latter is never fully captured or determined by the practices that condition it. Rather, corporeality can reconfigure itself through the torsion of those practices, that is, by unfolding and piercing them with intervals-gaps (écarts). The vocabulary of torsion and écarts shall be crucial throughout the rest of this book as key tools to advance in the consideration of the fundamental issue that concerns us: the manners in which bodies can break with the forms of subjection that condition them, in order to produce egalitarian transformations in the world. However, before addressing the relation between these egalitarian transformations and corporeal practices that shape what Rancière calls “political subjectivization,” I discuss, in chapter 3, how the author’s dialogue confrontation with other approaches makes possible an assessment of the conditions prevailing in the contemporary world, interpreted in terms of a consensualist view. My purpose in doing so is to relate consensualism to certain analyses of neoliberalism (particularly Harvey’s and Brown’s) in order to argue that, at different levels and in different registers, it produces an objectivizing understanding of the “state of the world,” of the “state of things.” The effect on bodies of this objectivizing understanding is, in my view, one of dispossession with respect to the desire to be other than what they are, the desire for a different world, that is, the desire for emancipation. In chapter 4, I take on the task of articulating Rancière’s formulations on political action and his logic of disagreement with the proposals of emancipatory popular movements that confront the dispositifs and effects of consensualism, particularly its forms of dispossession of the common potency of bodies to intervene in their circumstances. I argue that this approach is consistent with Rancière’s aesthetic cartography, which the author describes also as a “method of equality.” In fact, according to this cartography, egalitarian transformations of the world cannot be imposed by a certain theoretical model; rather, they must be produced by emancipated political subjects, in the forms of reinvention of the common that they can create by affirming their equal capacity. On the other hand, I demonstrate that this approach, in dialogue with some anthropological perspectives focused on the production of knowledge regarding emancipatory social movements, makes it possible to appreciate how these practices can lead to an activity of political experimentation, in which the expansion of the horizon of possibilities is put into play (cf. Fernández 2017, 219). But, how would it be possible to extend those emancipatory transformations from the web of experiences to social and state institutions that are more egalitarian? This is the question addressed in chapter 5, on the basis of some of Rancière’s proposals, but also going beyond them, since this is an

16

Introduction

issue not explicitly elaborated on by the author. In order to contribute to this discussion, I first show that Rancière’s position is neither anti-institutions nor anti-state,14 but rather, not state-centered. It is concerned with affirming the necessary autonomy of emancipation practices, as well as the way in which they can produce institutional inscriptions and use them to make way for other forms of emancipation. At the same time, I discuss Rancière’s comprehension of democracy and the elements it can provide to shape—through an exercise of political imagination—dissensual institutions of the common. To develop this point, I rely on proposals akin to those of Rancière, but that have delved further into this issue, particularly the work of Raquel Gutiérrez (2014, 2017) on the uprisings in Bolivia (between 2001 and 2005), Dardot and Laval’s (2014) interpretation in their recent book on the common, and Étienne Balibar’s formulations regarding the relations between institutions and violence (2015b). By bringing together such different yet convergent approaches, my concern is not so much to provide a response to crucial issues in contemporary reflection but to chart a tentative course of questions, which also emerges from current political experiments and remains open to those that may arise in times yet to come. Finally, in the last chapter, I return to some of Rancière’s reflections, particularly on the image, as well as to certain aesthetic interventions, in order to rethink how consensual dispositifs can be fractured at the level of affects and forms of perception, by means of counter-consensual dispositifs. These are aesthetic arrangements that can give rise to other forms of imagining being-with-others, embracing the unstable heterogeneity of social worlds, the conflict between temporality and heterochrony, and, amidst them, unexpected potencies of bodies that persist and affirm themselves despite everything, to say it with Didi-Huberman. QUESTIONS OF METHOD I do not want to close this perhaps too long introduction without discussing some of the methodological considerations that characterize my writing in this book. I hope to have made clear thus far that more than an inquiry into Rancière’s thought, the book is an experiment in thinking with Rancière, by means of and beyond his formulations. This experiment involves taking up Rancière’s aesthetic, affective, experiential, and corporeal exploration of practices and relating that aesthetic-cartographic methodology with current issues and experiences of popular movements, which Rancière does not take into account. This already indicates something fundamental about this book: the fact that it involves a task of composition, of connection between different concepts (Rancière’s and those produced by social actors and anthropologists)



Introduction 17

and experiences of political transformation—connection and not application. As Brian Massumi (2002, 17) has rightly pointed out, application implies attempting to control what happens, its contingency, on the basis of a certain framework of intelligibility that gives meaning, shapes, and anticipates something considered to be in need of orientation. In contrast, opting for a task of composition as understood here has to do with three methodological commitments that I also take up from Rancière: (1) refusing to separate empirical and theoretical work, in order to emphasize the production of forms of intelligibility of experience (in both experiential and academic work) and ways of fracturing and rupturing them through a type of writing for which “transformations in thinking are always transformations in the thinkable” (Rancière 2016c, 111). These transformations may be traced by dwelling on certain scenes, that is, constructions that evince moments of alteration, of reconfiguration of a web of experience, and of the frameworks of intelligibility that underpin it (see Rancière 2013a, xi; 2016c, 67). These courses of thought modify what is sayable, thinkable, and imaginable. (2) As we shall see at the beginning of chapter 4, the above aims at adopting a method of equality according to which all the discourses of political actors, scholars, and literature are situated on the same level; there is no privileged level, although their forms of saying are different. The idea is to conceive them not as different discourses but as different productions of bodies to intervene and find their way in the world, as discourses that are translatable into one another. In this sense, I undertake the translation of some discourses into others; particularly, Rancière’s thought is translated into certain social movements and vice versa, highlighting the way in which popular movements produce their own understanding of the situations they face and how that understanding can be articulated with—or exceed—formulations like Rancière’s, which are quite exposed to the political experimentation of social actors. (3) What is also at stake here is conceiving philosophical work as indisciplinary thought, which destabilizes boundaries and creates unforeseen relations among different languages, assumed as the product of the same common potency. For this reason, I do not hesitate to combine philosophical reflections with ethnographic constructions that seek to map the singularity of certain political struggles and confrontations. In doing so, however, I do not lose sight of the fact that the objectives of an aesthetic-cartographic methodology focused on certain aesthetic and political scenes, which make it possible to rethink the course and effects of forms of emancipation, are different from those at stake in ethnographic descriptions of social practices, given the theoretical production and analytical and creative complexity that such work of “observation” entails (Jaramillo 2014, 16; Fernández 2017, 232). In

18

Introduction

chapter 4, particularly, I seek to establish a dialogue between Rancière’s perspective and certain anthropological approaches that also conceive research as “a dynamic space for conceptual creation” (Fernández 2017, 232), as an intervention in the social world that is capable of cocreating, together with the actors and practices it is concerned with. These methodological commitments are linked to a thought that, like ­Rancière’s, is understood to be exposed to and characterized by contingency. For this very reason, my book attempts to reflect and provide different viewpoints on disturbing yet encouraging current circumstances, in an effort to intervene in them and shape paths to confront them. This relation to the current situation is also reflected in the manner in which I pose problems and propose interpretations throughout the book, resorting to ethnographic vignettes, testimonies, and current events clippings, but, above all, taking into account the discursive productions of popular movements. In fact, these productions guide my reflection and put it in dialogue with the problems and dead ends posed by the present, showing that these are issues that need to be thought and made visible in aesthetic-political efforts of conceptual experimentation. In view of the above, it could be said that my writing in this book also seeks to be aesthetic-cartographic, with everything this entails: reflecting on the frameworks of meaning and perception inherent in certain discourses, following up on certain scenes that make it possible to disassemble frameworks of meaning and perception, placing the different discourses mobilized (philosophical, ethnographic, scientific, political, testimonial, discursive production of social movements) on the same level, as forms of intervention that assemble or disassemble experiential frameworks. But, above all, I take the web of arguments that I build here as a task of montage and assembly of problems, perspectives, and types of discourses around a constellation of issues that I believe to be extremely current and which I have called, perhaps for lack of a better name, the “politics of bodies.” NOTES  1. Rancière does not make a terminological distinction between “body” and “­corporeality.” For that reason, I use the two terms interchangeably throughout the book, bearing in mind that the author does not adopt a naturalized and objectivizing understanding of the body from which contemporary perspectives on embodiment have distanced themselves, from both the constructivist and phenomenological approaches.   2.  This is an issue that has been at the heart of what is broadly known as contemporary “critical theory” for some time now: from classical post-structuralist approaches (see Foucault 1971, 1975, 1976; Deleuze and Guattari 1980; Deleuze 1981) and more recent perspectives that mobilize the feminist tradition in a different



Introduction 19

way (see Butler 1990, 1993, 1997, 2013, 2015; Braidotti 1994, 2002; Grozs 1994, 2017), to post-Marxist and Gramscian discussions of hegemony (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2005; Mouffe, 2013a), elaborations on decolonial thought (see Fanon 1952; Spivak 1999), contributions from post-metaphysical political ontologies (see Nancy 2000; Agamben 2014; Esposito 2014), to the more recent ontologicalaffective turn (see Massumi 2002; Sedgwick 2003; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Berlant 2011), to cite a few examples. Although Rancière does not usually appear among these references, one of the purposes of this book is to situate his reflections in this horizon of inquiry in order to show not only that the issue of the body is essential to his formulations regarding emancipation but also that they can contribute to contemporary discussions on forms of embodiment and their role in political action.   3.  While Massumi does not actually specify what prevalent theories he is referring to, they seem to be close to those of Bourdieu and to some of Foucault’s readings, including that of Butler, as Hemmings (2005, 555) has pointed out.   4.  I speak of “affects” and not of “feelings,” in order to account for the infraand transindividual nature of these corporeal intensities, which originate outside subjective configurations, pierce them, and fracture them, circulating among them. Although Rancière does not explicitly elaborate on affect, in the sense of contemporary affect theory, his considerations regarding the aesthetic dimension of experience make it possible to draw inferences in that direction. According to this perspective, affect refers not to pre-cultural, universal forces but to forces or impulses that take shape in social practices, in experiencing, and can also exceed said practices. These forces that emerge are heterogeneous, conflictive, and, as such, they can be reshaped in the quotidian work of bodies on themselves and in their relations with others.  5. As explained in chapter 3, by appealing to the notion of consensualism, Rancière avoids the term “neoliberalism,” increasingly used in critical theory, either in the Marxist sense of an ideology (see, e.g., Harvey 2005) that masks verifiable social realities or in the sense of Foucault’s forms of governmentality (see, e.g., Brown 2003, 2006).   6.  In this respect, Rancière’s formulations might seem come close to Agamben’s ideas regarding the “anthropological machine” or those of Esposito on the “dispositif of the person.” Nevertheless, the reflections of the three authors differ enormously in terms of their assumptions and implications. In the case of the two Italian thinkers, what is at stake, despite their differences, is an ontological understanding of the political field, which aims at tracing long-duration “machines” and “dispositifs,” as well as ways to exceed them, on the basis of the theoretical work of the philosopher who conceives such excedence as something yet to occur or that only takes place on the edge of a radical break. On the contrary, Rancière is interested in considering police and consensual dispositifs that can operate differently (see chapter 1 in this respect); but, above all, he addresses the manner in which those dispositifs have been and are disrupted, torsioned, and reconfigured by popular practices of reinvention of the bodies and of the world they share, to which this thinker exposes himself without neutralizing his singularity.   7.  In saying this, I am thinking about the way in which the immunitarian system has tended to be explained in military terms, as a system of defense from and

20

Introduction

elimination of an alien other that threatens the integrity of a body, as well as in the way this has been extrapolated to the understanding of the social body, conceived as a type of organism. (In this respect, see Martin [1994]; Esposito [2002].)   8.  Resonating with Ángel Rama’s already classic work, The Lettered City.   9.  Nevertheless, I distance myself from Butler’s notion of political action, which is firmly grounded in a logic of recognition (that I will discuss in chapter 4), and from a Levinasian notion of responsibility, which is more ethical than political, since its figure of the radical Other makes it impossible to account for dissensual processes of subjectivization. 10. I shall revisit this issue in chapters 3 and 4, given that is a controversial statement that deserves further elaboration, taking into account, for example, the Habermasian opposition between the autonomous subject and the neoliberal subject (see Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation” from 1998 [quoted in Brown 2006, 703]). 11. I am thinking, for example, of organizations such as the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC), the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), the Coordinador Nacional Agrario (CNA), the Congreso de los Pueblos (which brings together several of these movements as well as others), and the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, to mention but a few of the numerous movements and networks that have been arising in Colombia. I shall return to some of these movements later in the book. 12.  As João Biehl (2005) and Elizabeth Povinelli (2008, 2011) have fully demonstrated in their works. 13.  While it is true that certain authors touch on the matter obliquely and tangentially (see, e.g., Power [2009] and Jolaosho [2015]), they do not deal with it directly nor with its implications for the understanding of emancipation in Rancière. Davide Panagia has paid more attention to the issue of the body, but always subordinating it to his reading of politics on the basis of sensory transformations, and insisting especially on the idea of sentient body (Panagia 2009a, 7; 2009b, 302; 2018). It has also been pointed out that in one of his recent texts, Aisthesis, Rancière focuses on “new modes of bodily activity and indeed new modalities of affectivity, made possible by the modern aesthetic regime” (Deranty 2016, 55). Furthermore, in a direction that comes close to what is argued in this book, Deranty himself has suggested that “bodies in Rancière’s late work escape totalizing discursive and symbolic overdetermination; this is precisely what makes them rebellious bodies” (Deranty 2016, 55). In what follows, I shall dwell on this capacity of bodies to “escape” as a condition for their rebelliousness, specifying what it presupposes and entails, but arguing that this idea is present throughout Rancière’s work, particularly in his early writings, and, therefore, cannot be considered characteristic of his most recent works. 14. As often argued by commentators like Žižek (2006), May (2008, 2010a, b), Hallward (2009), Castro Gómez (2015), and Myers (2016).

Part I

RETHINKING THE EMANCIPATION OF BODIES TODAY

. . . dig out a gap-interval (écart), a furrow traced in the present, to intensify the experience of another way of being. —Rancière, Dissenting Words, 31–32

Chapter 1

Mapping the Practices of Emancipation

Jacques Rancière undoubtedly stands out among contemporary thinkers due to his interest in tracing the practices of emancipation in their singularity and their aesthetic-political (experiential, corporeal, affective) dimension. In fact, some of the author’s early post-Althusserian texts such as Proletarian Nights (1981) address the manner in which the displacements in the daily practices of corporealities, in the use of times and spaces, produce “aesthetic” alterations or subtle fissures in the ways of perceiving and saying, which can foster collective transformations of a social space (Quintana 2016a, 1). Likewise, in later more programmatic or theoretical texts, such as On the Shores of Politics (1990) or Disagreement (1995), Rancière emphasizes that a fundamental aesthetic dimension always comes into play in political issues. This dimension has to do with the way in which a common space is experienced: the boundaries of that space, that which is understood as shared in it, and who is included and can decide about that which is assumed to be common in it (Quintana 2016a, 1). In the course of these reflections, Rancière suggests that there are diverse forms of emancipation and gradually differentiates between forms of intellectual emancipation and forms of political or collective emancipation, always underscoring that these practices operate in an aesthetic dimension and have distinguishable political effects that, nevertheless, reinforce one another. In this chapter, I intend to explore the issues that are at stake in this difference between emancipation practices, as well as their possible intersections and collaboration, in order to raise the questions that will guide this book. Specifically, I wish to begin by reflecting on the way in which the difference between intellectual emancipation and political emancipation relates to the methodology developed and deployed by Rancière in his works—a methodology he has described as a “general poetics” or a “cartography of possibilities.” More 23

24

Chapter 1

concretely, I will argue that the differentiation between forms of emancipation has to do with the manner in which this methodology makes it possible to think the heterogeneity of social formations and, therefore, the multiplicity of strategies and forms of intervention of emancipatory practices: how they may be displayed in imperceptible dissensus, explicit disagreements, antagonisms, frictions, and forms of negotiation; in the daily practices of the self; and in evental stagings that shatter the time of everyday life. This also entails addressing the different effects of these practices (effects of redescription, inscription, transformation) in the setting of the common. Thus, I am interested in reflecting on the implications of emphasizing that heterogeneity and opening up the question of the possible passages, articulations, and collaborations among these different forms of intervention, in order to suggest that today, more than ever, this question involves the issue of the body: the politics of the body, the experiential, aesthetic, corporeal, and affective dimensions of emancipation. 1.1.  A CARTOGRAPHY OF POSSIBILITIES It is necessary to think in terms of intervals-gaps (écarts), because thinking in terms of continuity necessarily banalizes the object, explaining what is close in terms of what is closest, without establishing any difference between that which is closest and the boundaries of a world. —Rancière “La democracia es fundamentalmente la igualdad,” 249

A very broad dimension of the aesthetic comes into play in the multiple registers in which the relation between the aesthetic and the political may be displayed: in the singular reconfigurations of corporealities, in political actions, in the politics of art, or in the aesthetic practices of collective action. The aesthetic dimension inherent to all of these experiences refers to how we produce, make, or find sense, to the manner in which we identify something as “real” or “given,” on the basis of certain ways of configuring it. It also refers to how identifications of this type always involve assembling and disassembling, a certain relation of sense and sense (Rancière 2009c, 2): between sense (the established meanings) and the sensed (the endured, the affects, the perceived); between certain boundaries and positions of corporeality that define and distribute a common space. Thus, to become aware of this fundamental aesthetic dimension is to acknowledge that we understand, feel, are affected, and have experiences on the basis of certain “distributions of the sensible” (partages du sensible), that is, on the basis of the conditions of possibility of these experiences, which have emerged historically and give rise to a socially accepted community of sense and perception (cf. Rancière 2004c, 12–13).



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It is a matter of the “forms of distribution of bodies in society and [the] capacities attributed to those bodies” (Rancière 2016c, 58), which define relations between meanings and forms of perception. These can occur in different distributions: in more or less cohesive, incorporated, sedimented assemblages, established according to determined rules of the game that assert themselves as “true,” “given,” “real,” “identifying” (Quintana 2016a, 6). Thus, boundaries arise that stabilize what is possible and impossible, as well as capacity and incapacity, that which corresponds to a body in a social place that would be its own, its identity (what Rancière calls police logic).1 But there are also relations of disassembly that, in disrupting the normal “relation of sense and sense” (Rancière 2009c, 2) and showing its contingent conjunction, can foster new configurations that challenge the given boundaries between the possible and the impossible, between capacity and incapacity, between places and identities (what Rancière calls the logic of politics). Rancière uses the notion of logic in several instances to refer to the relations of sense and sense that can be traced on the basis of this cartographic analysis. Thus, to refer to the conjunctive relation of sense and sense, Rancière speaks of police logic (consensual logic, representative, teleological, causal, and hierarchical logic, the logic of suspicion or demystification, etc.); and to allude to the disjunctive relation, he speaks of the logic of politics (dissensual logic, logic of disagreement, of de-identification, aesthetic, egalitarian logic, logic of the supplement, of trust). He also refers to other social logics found among the latter, crossing them, displacing them, or reducing one to the other. Our task shall be to gradually elucidate why Rancière conceives emancipatory practices as “disjunctive”; what is inegalitarian about conjunctive police practices; to what extent disjunction can create and affirm forms of equality; and what a disjunctive movement allows us to think.2 For the time being, one can say that the distinction between assembling (conjunctive or police) and disassembling (disjunctive or political) practices makes it possible to emphasize the heterogeneity of social formations: the manner in which they are thought as assemblages or, as Rancière calls them, “distributions,” shaped by different logics and by resources, mechanisms, and dispositifs (webs of discourses, practices, gestuality, forms of perception),3 which can be asserted from these logics, along different paths of meanings and relations—for example, relations of conflict, friction, antagonism, or negotiation. Furthermore, it is important to underscore the heterogeneity of the social field and of the different arrangements, assemblages, or articulations of sense and perception produced in it, in order to provide an account of what it means for Rancière to think of subjections in terms of “police distributions” of the sensible. Thus, he avoids talking in terms of “ideological machines” that produce inevitable illusions (like Althusser), or of a “disciplinary rule” of conduct, which controls the possible actions of bodies

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by shaping them (like Foucault) (Rancière 2011b, 242). What is worth highlighting is the fact that police distributions operate by joining together data and realities in heterogeneous assemblages or conjunctions, in plays of relations that establish what is thinkable, realizable, reasonable for bodies, and how those boundaries can become fixed when assumed as a “datum, more or less accepted, more or less conscious—which forms and limits the capacities of perceiving and thinking” (Rancière 2011b, 242). But, in any case, it is essential to point out that this datum, which fixes meaning and capacities in a subjecting manner, defines a plurality of different articulations between its elements, a multiplicity of possibilities that combine together in different ways; on the other, it is constantly modified, for individuals and collectivities, either by singular subsystems, or by events that, breaking the ordinary temporal logic, deploy other forms of possible experience, other possible ways of giving sense to these experiences. (Rancière 2011b, 242)

It is thus crucial to underscore the heterogeneity of police dispositifs conceived as “assemblages” in order to think how such dispositifs not only do not saturate the field of action completely (Foucault 1982, 790) but also, as Rancière says, have “little control over what they thought they were controlling” (Rancière 2016c, 61) so that their boundaries may be crossed, pierced here and there, in unforeseeable manners. A result of highlighting that plurality of different articulations and their way of being as assemblages is the possible production of intervals-gaps (écarts)4 in those subjecting arrangements. These intervals allow bodies possibilities of escape, alteration, and reconfiguration with respect to the boundaries of sense and perception that fix them. In some cases, they also facilitate the equally heterogeneous, or more precisely heterological, transformative intervention in a world whose common character is reexperienced and re-signified, as I shall argue further on. Furthermore, insisting on this aesthetic dimension and this heterogeneity also entails that there is no pure terrain of politics or emancipation, that could be thought as an ontologically excessive externality (cf. Žižek 2006; May 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Hallward 2009) or as an encounter, in a third terrain, of two ontologically different logics (cf. Deranty 2003).5 However, to assert this nonexternality does not mean to say that the only space in which emancipatory practices emerge is the police order (cf. Chambers 2013, 62). This is so because the police, according to Rancière, is not a terrain or a place but, rather, as we have seen, a logic of assemblage of sense and sense. Neither is it an operation, as Chambers rightly acknowledges, that can simply be identified with a logic of domination. However, in saying this, I do not lose sight of the following statement by Rancière: “Politics does not stem from a place outside of the police [. . .]. There is no place outside of the



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police. But there are conflicting ways of doing things with the ‘places’ that it allocates: of relocating, reshaping or redoubling them” (Rancière 2011a, 6). But to say there is no “outside” the police does not necessarily entail affirming that emancipatory practices emerge from the police, in a sort of different reiteration (Butler 1990, 1993), or parodic mimesis (Irigaray 1974, 1977), for example, of discursive forms that regulate social life. What it does mean is to say that emancipation does not occur outside the police, but in its destabilizations, torsions, unfoldings, and alterations. That is why Rancière insists on the conflicting ways in which it is possible to do things with places allocated by the police, ways of “relocating, reshaping or redoubling them” (Rancière 2011a, 6), that is, of torsioning them. Now then, if forms of emancipation, in their different operations, are able to unfold the police logic, it is because they can make use of police resources and divide or multiply them, exploiting their heterogeneity, showing that they are not just police resources and that they can be used politically and, therefore, do not only produce forms of domination. For example, when Rancière points out that emancipatory political actions can make a political use of rights when constructing their demands and their structure of disagreement, he is not saying that such practices emerge from the police order or from its parodic reiteration (see Rancière 1999, 87, 97, 106, 108; 2004b). He is speaking, rather, of the political unfolding of a resource that, in given orders, is conceived as a principle that guarantees the identity of a community with itself, the legitimacy of the state order, or the regulation of social relations, and, therefore, tends to operate in a police fashion. The disjunctive operations that characterize emancipatory movements and their aesthetic-political interventions at the established boundaries of sense are, then, the unfolding, torsion, and piercing through intervals (écarts) of certain assemblages established as the reality (of bodies, of the common world). These operations make it possible to create and assert forms of equality since they produce an excess within these established boundaries, not outside or beyond them. These are experiences, paths of understanding, vindications that deploy and assert capacities uncounted or badly counted by the established police distributions. Therefore, these experiences turn out to be excessive because they cannot be recognized and determined or identified within the established allocations of sense, in the given assemblages of meanings and affective perceptions, although they arise in their midst. Thus, said excess is not the outside or the immeasurable Other, but the possibility of emergence, within the given distributions of the sensible, of “aesthetic heterotopias.”6 This means other forms of experience of corporealities, which allow them to detach themselves from the manner in which they are assembled, located, fixed to certain positions. In these displacements, bodies de-identify with respect to the functions and capacities attributed to them by

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virtue of those positions, through other uses of times and spaces, contaminations with forms of saying other than their “own,” which gradually shatter that established relation between body and word that constitutes identity (see Rancière 2009a, 75). They are fractures that separate bodies from the behavior assigned to them according to class, gender, or, in general, any social assignment of identity: “gaps that open up distances between voice and body, between the body and the expected word” (Quintana 2016a, 7). They are aesthetic heterotopias that have to do with reconfigurations of corporealities in their interactions, which make it possible to display other forms of being, feeling, saying; different dealings with others; spaces and positions other than those assigned and naturalized; and, therefore, forms of experience that open up the field of the possible by challenging the rigid boundaries between the possible and the impossible of police logics. Such aesthetic heterotopias can also emerge from collective actions that question established interpretations of the common, that is, manifestations that give rise to new political subjects that have to “invent the scene upon which spoken words may be audible, in which objects may be visible, and individuals themselves may be recognized,” starting out by questioning the boundaries established between “legitimate [authorized] and illegitimate speakers” (Rancière 2000, 116), produced by police assemblages of sense. Furthermore, those heterotopias can occur in artistic practices and forms of literary enunciation, when they open up other forms of perception and enunciation and other affectivities. In general, they can also be opened up in practices and forms of thinking that disregard the privileged position of certain types of knowledge and the disciplinary boundaries that define beforehand that which is endowed with meaning and can be thought (Rancière 2009a, 17–18). This means practices that evince not only the manner in which those boundaries facilitated the deployment of forms of domination and subjection but also the way in which they presuppose what they deny: “a common power that is displayed in actions, discourses, images and their intersections” (Quintana 2017a, 7–8). This common power is precisely what Rancière’s methodology seeks to affirm, in conceiving itself as “an aesthetics of knowledge” (Rancière 2006a) and “a general poetics” (Rancière 2016c, 63). It is an aesthetics of knowledge dedicated to finding scenes and figures: moments in which the practices of bodies are able to create new forms of experience, manifestation, and argumentation in order to make other things visible and thinkable by displacing the boundaries of what is possible and can be experienced and by digging out intervals-gaps in those boundaries so as to disassemble and reconfigure them (see Rancière 2000). Therefore, this methodology can also be defined as a general poetics, focused on “the multiple ways in which it is possible to make the interval-gap (écart) work” (Rancière 2016c, 62):



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that “non-concordance among multiplicities” that occurs in disjunctive or dissensual practices. Because, as I have already hinted at, emancipation ­develops—not at the extremes or at the edge of the abyss—but in the interstices. This is also why Rancière describes his methodology as a “topography” or “­cartography of possibilities”: “Possible” is what could well not be, what is not the consequence of a sequence of circumstances that precede it and predetermine it. By the same token it’s what keeps space open for connections other than the ones produced by the necessary. (Rancière 2016c, 147)

Nevertheless, a “topography of possibilities” is far from being an unsituated thought that loses sight of the conditions it emerges from, or a sort of wishful thinking that tries to convince us, in a very problematic way that everything is possible. “Possibility” refers, first of all, to what might not be, that is, what cannot be foreseen or predetermined through reasons or explanations that account for what should have been or happened; therefore, the possible is that which cannot be asserted as necessary. Moreover, the above quote suggests that the possible is a type of temporary assemblage that differs from the temporary assemblage of the necessary. It is an assemblage that “keeps space open for connections other than the ones produced by the necessary” (Rancière 2016c, 147), by that which is affirmed as necessary: the necessarily given or derivable, that which necessarily had to be and happen, but also that which can necessarily be. In this sense, “the possible” is not simply what can be counted as a possibility within certain given conditions of experience. Rather, the possible is what opens up the space for what was not conceived of as possible but can be. That is why “the possible” opens the field of experience to that which could not be foreseen, to that which has not taken place but could take place. Or to put it in other words, the unprecedented, indeterminable, unforeseeable according to the given conditions.7 The opening up of possibility, however, is not simply the affirmation of the impossible as possible. It has to do with the work of unfolding, of creating intervals in given conditions of experience that have shaped a certain materiality of experience but do not determine it completely. Or rather, they do not function as determinations because those conditions themselves are heterogeneous articulations and, as such, they exposed to conflict among their elements and they can be rearticulated. One might say then that a “topography of possibilities” seeks heterotopic scenes that open up a space for what could not be foreseen, breaking up what seemed necessary, evincing its contradictions and its conflictive condition: the nonplaces that pierce the established places; the different temporalities or

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heterochronies that traverse the stability of the present; the spectral existences that have no defined body, are not determinable, and exceed a given framework of intelligibility and rupture it amidst its boundaries.8 1.2.  INTELLECTUAL EMANCIPATION AND POLITICAL SUBJECTIVIZATION/DISSENSUS AND DISAGREEMENT The broad sense of aesthetics highlighted above intersects with the broad sense of politics mobilized by Rancière when he speaks about the politics of literature and of the arts, or, in general, about processes of emancipation (Quintana 2016a, 9). This broad sense usually indicates displacements and reconfigurations of the affects, dispositions, capacities of a corporeality, or at the boundaries that delimit the commonality of a space and its exclusions. It is a matter of opening up other forms of the sensorial that enter into conflict with the given ones; hence, their dissensual character. As Rancière reminds us in The Emancipated Spectator (2009d), dissensus is not the conflict of ideas or feelings; it is “a conflict between two regimes of sense, two sensory worlds. That is what dissensus means” (58). This broad sense of the political is always already aesthetic, also in a broad sense, because it refers to the way in which it is possible to create dissensual interruptions and reconfigurations in certain distributions of the sensible. These reconfigurations of the web of the sensible can occur at different levels, with varying strategies and effects. They can happen at the micropolitical level when, in their daily experience, subjects de-subject themselves from identities, times, functions, and assigned places, in order to develop other forms of being and feeling. These are experiences that affect the assemblage of corporealities, open up gaps in them, and interrupt the smooth “functioning of their incorporations” (Manrique and Quintana 2016, xvii). They are also experiences in which a corporeality can prove to have a capacity it did not know it had, thus evincing its intellectual equality (Rancière tends to refer to this type of displacement in terms of “intellectual emancipation”9) (Quintana 2016a, 9). In this case, then, the processes of dissensual disassembly and reconfiguration involve singular bodies, their mobility, and the way the latter already affects the landscape of the common, given that fractures in identity that assert unacknowledged capacities can serve as the basis to establish different forms of relating to the world and to others (9). However, these disassemblies and reconfigurations can also occur at another level, in which a collective, a community, an organization stages a disagreement (mésentente) that allows it to confront marginalization, victimizing forms of integration, and violences produced in social and government spaces. Such staging shows how those spaces are crossed by others that



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only count by not counting (Rancière usually refers to this level in terms of “emancipation or political subjectivization”) (Quintana 2016a, 10). Let us now delve into each of those levels in order to reflect on the passages between them. 1.2.1.  Everyday Displacements in the Web of Experience In the case of the forms of emancipation that I have described here as “­micropolitical,” one might think that they are anonymous, individual, or collective practices of everyday reconfiguration of a web of experience: reshaping and reappropriation practices through which bodies produce renegotiations with times, spaces, and modes of experiencing, in order to enable other forms of relating to themselves and to others in their daily lives. In these practices, an experiential web is disassembled and reassembled so as to affirm, in diverse ways, the mobility of bodies, their potency for reinvention, even in the limited conditions they might be thrown into. As I shall analyze in the following chapter, Rancière explored this dimension and suggested some intersections with collective mobilizations in his unique archival, ­philosophical-literary work, Proletarian Nights. In an effort that might converge to a certain extent with E. P. Thompson’s, Rancière explores the manner in which the claims of some French workers in 1830 had to do with their dignity, their recognition, the way in which they were identified by certain discourses and practices that contributed to their exploitation, by fixing their identity. In these workers’ demands for more dignified work, it was impossible to dissociate the material from the symbolic, as in certain traditional Marxist readings, which is why they cannot be considered mere reactions to some given material conditions.10 Nevertheless, the whole point of Rancière’s approach in Proletarian Nights is to make evident the singular forms of alteration (in images, discourses, and forms of assembly) that gradually took shape and materialized in those claims. Thus, rather than focusing, like Thompson, on the conditions of a moral economy or on a certain world of traditions—of norms and obligations, or of pre-mercantile economic practices—that would have made those claims possible, Rancière, with the particular methodology deployed in this text, chooses to make visible the gaps, the holes, the unforeseeable interstices, the alterations, and the deviations that cannot be derived from a given moral world. It is from those deviations that a language of confrontation emerged, a language of vindication, or, in the terms of the later Rancière, of disagreement. This also shows how the aesthetic-cartographic methodology that Rancière develops in his archival (Proletarian Nights, The Ignorant Schoolmaster) and archaeological works (e.g., The Names of History) sets aside thinking in terms of “causes” and “conditions of possibility,” in order to

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consider the “effects” on a field of experience of certain practices, discourses, and scenes, their possible effect of excess and reconfiguration of the established parameters of sense and perception. Returning to the micropolitical dimension of these displacements, another consideration is relevant. I am fully aware that an important current in contemporary anthropology has addressed, from different perspectives, these alterations in everyday life that produce alterations in social fabrics and cultural practices (see Scott 1985, 1990; Álvarez, Escobar, and Dagnino 1998; Edelman 2001; Das 2007, 2012; Fernández 2017). And I would also like to highlight that beyond Proletarian Nights, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and some passages in Short Voyages to the Land of People, Rancière has not elaborated much more on that which might be at stake in these quotidian practices of alteration. Moreover, his interventions in those texts are carried out in a way that differs greatly from that of traditional historiographical work. Neither does he enter into dialogue with perspectives that were alternative in their time, like Thompson’s, or with ethnographic contributions like James Scott’s (1985, 1990), which shifted the perspective toward everyday experience, while, at the same time, questioning positions such as those of Althusser and Bourdieu,11 which Rancière also sought to move away from. Thus, I would like to establish a relationship between these reflections and some ethnographic perspectives that address the experiential, affective, corporeal dimension of transformative practices, in order to foster in this book a dialogue with certain anthropological viewpoints. In fact, the following statement by Indian anthropologist Veena Das is a good example of what is at stake at the level of practices that transform the everyday web of experience, which Rancière also addressed when discussing the idea of intellectual emancipation: I think that ordinary people in the simple process of living their lives come to form very deep reflections on how they live their lives. They may not have the philosophical language, but in a certain sense it seems to me that there ought to be no distance between a true philosophy and discerning the way in which people live their lives, how they try to learn how they might inhabit worlds that are given to us with all the signs of destruction they have endured. (Das and Turcot 2010, 141)

The aspects described by Das are precisely those that we shall be able to appreciate in plebeian philosopher Louis Gabriel Gauny: the manner in which a body, in its everyday practices, shifts away from certain places, positions, and uses of times and spaces, in order to carry out an experiential reflection on its own practices, how it lives, the type of life imposed on it by the prevailing forms of social regulation, and the possibilities and paths of another life that might be able to escape, disrupt, or torsion those



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regulations. In this sense, Gauny makes it possible for Rancière to reflect on something that Das has also pursued in her ethnographic work: namely, the manner in which bodies, including those that seem to be the most subjected, abused, and victimized, can do something with those subjections, by twisting, torsioning, and turning them around in their daily routines, in the times and spaces of everyday, ordinary life. And, as we shall see, Gauny is able to call attention to the ways in which bodies can de-subject themselves and affirm their capacities, from within the affective and conflictive density of their experiences, as Das (and other anthropologists like Escobar [2008], Povinelli [2011], and Fernández [2017]) has pointed out in her writings. Moreover, this attention to the mobility of corporealities also makes it possible to recognize that these are experiences crossed by multiple subjections, without having to think their excedence as external to them, or as completely autonomous with respect to dominations (which can be inferred at times from Scott’s perspective, with his idea of “autonomous spaces of subalternity” [cf. Fernández 2017, 43]).12 In any case, Rancière has also reflected on other forms of emancipation that, in Das’ terms, have to do with the level of the “extraordinary” (cf. Das and Turcot 2010, 141), of that which disrupts the time of everyday life and the time of regulations, leaving open and suggesting possible passages between these quotidian displacements and those that can fracture a shared framework of experience. In fact, on several occasions, Rancière makes it possible to think of intersections and passages between the emancipatory displacements of bodies and the collective design of a scene of disagreement, which we have yet to talk about. He does so, for example, when he suggests that it is precisely that different knowledge and experience of oneself, produced at the first, micropolitical level of intellectual emancipations, which makes it possible, though not necessarily, to challenge the hierarchies underlying the relations of subjection and inequality reproduced in the social order, and which political collectives or processes of political subjectivization confront through their disagreement. Furthermore, those micropolitical displacements already create distances regarding the practices and dynamics of the established orders, which political actions put into question. What is more, despite the fact that Rancière does not develop this more in his works, one could argue that a single process of subjectivization can, at the same time, lead to less visible collective forms of action and ways of reconfiguring a web of experience, which, in turn, drive more visible actions, in a continuum that allows them to connect among one another.13 In this sense, Rancière would not endorse the dichotomous differentiation established by Scott between “everyday forms of resistance” (1985) or “infra-political resistance” (1990) and visible and public “political forms of resistance.” In fact, this differentiation not only loses sight of the possible

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and unforeseeable passages I just mentioned but also suggests a certain hierarchy of the political with respect to that described as “infra-political,” which, as we shall see throughout the book, Rancière would never agree with. Moreover, that differentiation cannot account for the manner in which the more visible manifestations can both intervene in a given public and reconfigure it by creating other subjects, problems, and ways of coping, as well as through practices of being with others that affect the web of ordinary experience. Finally, Scott’s differentiation presupposes a sharp dichotomous distinction between the dominated (poor) and the dominators (rich), which overlooks the way in which the dominated can de-identify through practices that assert their nature as an unclassifiable class, as an excedence with respect to the established class orderings. 1.2.2.  Scenes of Disagreement Nevertheless, despite recognizing these movements, passages, and nuances, Rancière still makes a difference between one level and the other, since he is interested in emphasizing other forms of emancipation that can emerge and that are not necessarily produced within the previously described everyday forms of alteration. Concretely, it is a question of thinking forms of emancipation that arise when a political subject is constituted, or, more exactly, a form of subjectivization that challenges the distribution of parts, places, and competences by linking a particular wrong done to a specific group with the wrong done to anyone by the police d­ istribution— the police’s denial of the capacity of the anyone. (Rancière 2009c, 11)

That which, according to Rancière, is at stake in the political action that causes disagreement to emerge is then the possibility of making visible to others (to others who do not acknowledge it) the way in which a social space and an order of sense “do wrong to equality” (fait tort à l’ égalité) (Rancière 1999) by always imposing boundaries of sense that fix some to nonsense and to invisibility, some that are at one and the same time counted and not counted as part of the political community. Making the wrong visible thus evinces “the falseness of evidence of any decisive opposition between human beings endowed with the logos and animals restricted to sole use of the organ of the voice” (phônè) (Rancière 1999, 21). But the wrong is not given; it has to be staged through words, gestures, polemic actions in which a community can present itself as divided, crossed by the supplement of the uncounted ones that are counted and not counted as part of the common world (­Quintana 2016a, 11). Furthermore, this division has much to do with the way in which the circulation of words, images, and affects allows for the generation of



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a heterological scene, a crossing of different logics, which pierces what is assumed as real and robs it of its evidence, allowing a conflict to appear, which “puts two worlds—two heterogeneous logics—on the same stage, in the same world,” thus asserting “the commensurability of incommensurables” (Rancière 2009c, 11; Quintana 2016a, 11). As we shall see in chapter 4, this process alludes to a we-others (nousautres) that was not previously identifiable in the social space and that confronts the given distributions of the sensible, especially the logos that orders an inegalitarian logic that sharply separates political subjects from mere lives, the human animals from the true humans, the political from the economic, technical-scientific decisions from mere popular opinion (Quintana 2016a, 12). For this reason, genuine disagreement emerges when some take on the right to evince a problem, an unrecognized object, by creating themselves as a collective that demands to be able to decide and participate in that which is considered common. This is precisely what a process of political subjectivization means. This is also why political subjects have to create the scene of appearance in which they “acquire sense and visibility,” thus challenging the established boundaries between “legitimate and illegitimate speakers.” Rancière defines political subjectivization as the emergence of “[i] a body and [ii] a capacity for enunciation [iii] not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, and (iv) whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience” (Rancière 1999, 35). Additionally, the constitution of a political subject implies that those few deemed unreasonable take over the word and reveal themselves as speaking subjects, thus manifesting their capacity for political reflection (cf. Rancière 1998, 27). But, how should we understand this emphasis on enunciation and speaking when talking about political subjectivization, and what are its implications? Would this not entail, after all, a certain logocentrism in Rancière’s reflections, which could create a great distance with corporeal displacements that are not necessarily discursive (Quintana 2016a, 14–15)? Anticipating some of the arguments of chapter 4, we could say that the emphasis on the fact that political subjectivization implies the emergence of a body and a capacity for enunciation presupposes the following: (1) the words enunciated aim at producing a meaning, albeit an unstable one, that is open to objections; (2) the words enunciated in political subjectivization exceed their function of “rigid designation” (Rancière 2000, 115), in order to become “contradictory performatives” that produce impossible identifications. For example: “we who appear are also the disappeared” (we the inhabitants of the Buenos Aires of 1983 who appear before you as silhouettes are the silhouettes of the bodies that no longer have a body and demand to appear in their disappearance), as the event known as El siluetazo14 seemed to express; or “ ‘I who am one am no one; in my own name, I am all the names of the any-one, of

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those uncountable ones that exceed any name,’ as Subcomandante Marcos proclaimed” (Quintana 2016a, 16)15; (3) the modes of enunciation of political subjectivization are not separable from corporealities crossed by affects; (4) the human voice is always capable of a certain language (not necessarily discursive and, much less, deliberative) that is always inseparable from affects; (5) although political subjectivization has to do with “polemic uses of the human” that allow for the emergence of a previously inexistent we-others, it does not entail a sense of the human, but, on the contrary, its transformability: the manner in which political actions also challenge “the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the human and the animal, the human and its organic environment, the natural and artifice, digging out intervals between those boundaries and, therefore, displacing them, reconfiguring them”16 (Quintana 2016a, 16–17). 1.2.3. Different Strategies and Passages—Singularity of the Approach In order to develop these issues, let us think of a scene that is very close, yet sometimes too far, from Colombians: the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. Without idealizing it or making visible its concrete tragic nature, let us address some of its discursive productions that the community hopes will be circulated, commented on, and made visible. To that effect, the community created a web page that is constantly expanded, in order to make itself visible, to make visible its space of disagreement, and, at the same time, to create itself as a form of political subjectivization that allows for the appearance of those threatened with dispossession of their territories, with destruction, or with mere inclusion as marginalized. It is, in fact, a heterotopic space in the sense described above, which, as stated in the declaration of the act of foundation—carried out twenty years ago by a collective of peasants beleaguered by the different forms of violence common in the Colombian territory—creates itself as a neutral territory with respect to both the intervention of the country’s official armed forces and the presence of guerrilla and paramilitary groups. Furthermore, it creates itself as a temporary community that will last as long as there is armed conflict in Colombia and paramilitary structures continue to permeate the current state. In this manner, the community refused to participate in the friends-enemies logic according to which Colombian armed groups, including the Colombian state itself, operate, and to allow themselves to be identified as either one of those parties. It also opposes the continued power of those parties to decide who lives and who dies in that community (Quintana 2016a, 12). However, despite distancing itself radically from the given state institutions, the community does not assert itself as removed from every prevailing



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legal institution.17 For example, in the published declarations expressing its disagreement, the community claims to be protected by the Declaration of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, as they allow it to demonstrate the injustice of being constantly exposed to massacres or displacement merely because they are demanding “respect for the universal right to life” in a state that, paradoxically, has vowed to guarantee that right, but has never really committed to doing so. In this way, the community can also evince the injustice of state practices that seek to dispossess them of their particular way of life and force them, by every possible means, to become part of private, transnational entrepreneurial projects that betray the universality allegedly defended by the state. In addition to this, the community also refuses to become a mere target for the intervention of humanitarian practices, and resists identification by those discourses and practices, by “reusing, crossing, and contaminating them from the perspective of diverse forms of saying and practices such as the theology of liberation, Marxism, and the history of peasant struggles in Colombia” (Quintana 2016a, 13; see Aparicio 2012, 117). Thus, by creating itself as a heterological community, this process of political subjectivization has given rise to a series of practices and experiences that vindicate the idea of a dignified life, in order to challenge the sovereign violence it has suffered, as well as the governmental and humanitarian conduction mechanisms that manage and seek to install economic dynamics guided by the logic of development of productivity, which deny local communities the capacity to organize their territories. Moreover, the community questions those government mechanisms for the construction of history that victimize it and tend to fix the past in a single narrative as something that is over and can be closed definitely though discourses of reconciliation and reparation. And it does so through heterochronic practices that seek to make visible the violence that led to so many deaths, the dead they do not want to forget, the specters that haunt them and in whose name they also act. In any case, we cannot lose sight of the fact that these practices of disagreement have also required other forms of relating with one another and that they have fractured, or at least made visible, forms of subjection, violence, and domination (such as patriarchal practices) rooted in customs of the rural world that are part of the community’s daily life. Moreover, these devices that open up disagreement have also allowed the afflicted bodies of the people living in the community to endure, to believe in difference and in the justice of what they are doing, despite feeling threatened and attacked once and again, and perhaps also haunted by the specter of what cannot take place, the specter of failure of a community that sometimes feels tragically condemned to having no future.

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In light of the above, it is possible to observe differences, but also passages between dissensual practices or forms of everyday emancipation and scenes of disagreement or subjectivization (political). With respect to the passages, the scene shows how the forms of disagreement suggested by the community affect people’s everyday life and cause affects to circulate that also drive the more visible struggles. Regarding the contrasts, we could say that it is not so much a difference of scale, as of expectations, hopes, and mobilization strategies. Thus, what matters is not merely to underscore the difference but also to use it to assert diverse strategies through which it is possible to disassemble and rearticulate a field of experience. Thus, because it is a question of different strategies—not always intentional or subjective—the contrast has nothing to do with individual processes in one case and collective processes in the other, given that micropolitical reconfiguration processes can arise in networks of relations among one another, and that forms of quotidian reconfiguration of a shared web of experience can also occur in forms of disagreement. Neither does the difference of strategies have to do merely with the idea that political subjectivization implies the emergence of an unprecedented instance of collective enunciation, while micropolitical alterations entail displacements of affects, gestures, and images, as if in one case the emphasis were on the discursive and, in the other, on the corporeal. Such a contrast would lose sight of the fact that a certain language is already displayed in a corporeality’s more manual work, in its gestures and practices; moreover, it would fall into an opposition between language-body, word-image, discourse-gesture, which is challenged by a reflection like Rancière’s. That opposition between the verbal and the corporeal would also lose sight of the fact that political arguments are also poetic arguments in which gestures and images can show more than formal reasoning can; it would ignore the fact that an image always presupposes intersections with words and that words can be images (see Rancière 2009d, 97). It would also omit the fact that the movements of bodies, joined together in political demonstrations, can, in some cases, show more “through their corporeal alliance and their gestures (for example, in strikes, blockades, occupation of public spaces) than argumentative deliberation between parties who attempt to erase their corporeality”18 (Quintana 2016a, 14). Let us now sum up the differences between intellectual and political emancipation, before going on to reflect on the passages. In the case of political subjectivization, we have the emergence of a scenario of disagreement that makes visible to others the contradictions present in a social space, which produce and reproduce mechanisms of inequality, exclusion, and subjection. This is achieved through diverse types of presentation strategies—performative, gestural, discursive—that also involve intersections, torsions, and reutilizations of police arguments and dynamics, and in actions carried out by those



Mapping the Practices of Emancipation 39

subjected to the former mechanisms. Disagreement creates a division within that established as common and public, which, in some cases, could even be considered an antagonism.19 Instances of dissensus, instead, generate subtle alterations that are also disruptions and frictions in everyday routines and corporeal practices. Using Rancière’s words, one could even say that while intellectual emancipation introduces the possibility of a certain “freedom in the heart of exploitation,” by opening up spaces and forms of equality amidst inequality, political emancipation makes visible to others forms of inequality and lack of freedom that produce certain established understandings of equality and freedom. Of course, the difference in strategies leads to different effects of those practices, among which unforeseeable circulations may occur. In one case, redescriptions and forms of reexperiencing the everyday web of experience may be produced: how a body lives its movements, the distributions of space and time, its affects, the arrangements that regulate its everydayness, and, from there, its relation to others, opening up intervals that allow for rhythms and forms of affectivity other than the established ones. Eventually, and in an uncalculated manner, they can lead to processes of political subjectivization. In the other case, reinventions of the common are produced, or, in Rancière’s terms, the reconfiguration of “the sensible texture of the community” for which certain laws, public policies, problems, and dealings make sense, starting out by reformulating and raising once again questions that are assumed to have been resolved beforehand in governmental dispositifs. Thus, in one case, one could speak of subjective renegotiations (Rancière and Colectivo Situaciones 2010, 9) with the given regulations, which can be experienced in the continuity and duration of everyday life and which can eventually translate into processes of political subjectivization; while, in the other, of interruptions that “stop one of the machines that allow for the functioning” of the stability of that which is assumed as normal. These interruptions would be characterized by a certain instability and a sort of ephemeral nature, given that the stoppage cannot go on indefinitely. However, those interruptions would have multiple effects by creating inscriptions of equality in the given institutions, which allow for other reinventions of the common, and by producing different forms of saying, showing, and appearing. These reinventions can lead to other everyday redescriptions and reexperiences, that is, to reconfigurations of the fabric of sensible experience. In their differences, these forms of emancipation can come together and articulate continuously, in uncalculated and unforeseeable manners. Furthermore, every scene of disagreement presupposes previous forms of alteration of everyday experience, and once political subjectivization and collective emancipation processes arise, it is possible to generate other quotidian transformations of the web of the sensible, whose effects might not be foreseeable.

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But, do expressions of disagreement have to be necessarily considered interruptions? As a matter of fact, they are interruptions that involve and can extend to less visible forms of organization of everyday life that make it possible to gradually reconfigure the landscape of the common. It would also be worth asking about the relation between these emancipatory practices and the institutions (state and nonstate) from which they emerge and which they challenge. More specifically, to what extent can disagreement be extended through institutional practices and forms of everyday life that are dissensual or exposed to the possibility of dissensus? And, above all, why not delve further into the passages and collaborations among different forms of emancipation, without seeking foreseeable links or formulas, which, of course, Rancière has wanted to avoid? To what extent is it crucial to rethink the role of corporeality in these practices in order to shape those crossings and passages between subjects’ singular reconfigurations and their collective action, as recently suggested by Judith Butler (2013, 2015; Butler and Athanasiou 2013) and can be inferred from some recent ethnographic work, such as that carried out by Arturo Escobar (2008, 2009, 2014), Raquel ­Gutiérrez (2017), and María Inés Fernández (2017, 154–55). This last question is decisive, especially when one takes into account the current forms of power and domination, with their effects of materialization (of establishment and production of certain senses and forms of perception) and dematerialization (of blocking contingency, exposure, and relationality) of bodies (see Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 10). These matters will guide the reflections carried out in the rest of this book. For the moment, apart from formulating them, this chapter has introduced what I consider to be one of the main contributions of Rancière’s thought, his indisciplinary aesthetic-cartographic methodology that aims at avoiding the reductionist, unifying, dichotomous language of the all or nothing, in order to underscore that the paths to emancipation have to do with experimentation, with redescriptions and reexperiencing of everydayness and with reinventions of the common, from the perspective of practices and logics understood as heterogeneous and conflictive assemblages among which passages, continuities, and collaborations can take place. These considerations on the different manners in which forms of emancipation and their experimental character can be deployed also make it possible to point out differences with respect to dominant views regarding these practices, particularly in the field of political science. On the one hand, these views usually focus on confrontational collective actions, thus losing sight of their experiential, aesthetic, corporeal character, while, on the other hand, they tend to produce an explanatory, voluntarist, and functionalist perspective. An approach like Rancière’s makes it possible, above all, to open up dissensus with respect to explanatory perspectives that view dissensual



Mapping the Practices of Emancipation 41

collective practices merely as “objects” of study, reducing them to the conditions from which they supposedly arise, their “patterns of organization,” and their “political-social effectiveness” (see McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996, 1–20; Fjeld, Quintana, and Tassin 2016, 4). These perspectives tend to assume a vertical distance with respect to practices, making it impossible to grasp the manner in which the latter intervene in the understanding of the social, which is what the researcher aims at, as well as the manner in which they can exceed the horizon of that considered possible by the researcher, in order to reconfigure the field of possibilities (Rancière 2017a, 36).20 Likewise, explaining political actions on the basis of causes and conditions can reduce them to “strategic forms of intervention whose objective would be to include a certain group that has been excluded from the established political system” (cf. Archila 2005; Staggenborg 2011) (see Fjeld, Quintana, and Tassin 2016, 4); it can understand them only as confrontational practices that challenge the authorities on behalf of the excluded, marginalized, or victimized, “taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the state institutions themselves” (see Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1998); or, it can understand them merely as “forms of expression of those opportunities” that would condition them in a determinant manner (cf. Bevington and Dixon 2005) (see Fjeld, Quintana, and Tassin 2016, 4). But by restricting collective actions to the vindication of the specific demands of actors that strategically seek only institutional recognition, these perspectives produce a “functionalist understanding of these practices,” one that loses sight of their capacity to create demands that make no sense within established institutional forms (state and socioculturally dominant forms). And, above all, they prevent us from understanding those practices that are not limited to demanding the “inclusion of the marginalized in an order that has excluded them,” but that they demand the transformation of the criteria instituted by the very same order that produced the marginalization (Fjeld, Quintana, and Tassin 2016, 5). Moreover, those approaches omit the fact that these actions cannot be simply described as intentional-subjective, but rather emerge from forms of dissensual relationality, from everyday practices that take place among subjects and that have already somewhat altered a web of experience, as I have begun to suggest in this initial part of the book. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the above does not in any way imply adopting the idea of “construction of identity” defended by the well-known “new social movements” theory (see Staggenborg 2011). While it is true that this idea of a collective identity does not necessarily entail a closed and fixed unity, and that it does recognize complex networks that are woven within it and allow for the production of “new challenges to the symbolic structure of a society,” this approach does have a questionable implication, namely, that it can lead to unsustainable separations between “the symbolic and the

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material, the State and civil society,” which can also obliterate the aspect of disagreement of an emancipatory social movement (Fjeld, Quintana, and Tassin 2016, 5). Thus, it would be possible to lose sight of the fact that such egalitarian claims confront mechanisms of identification that cannot be separated from “the very material forms of control of bodies and the regulation practices” that intervene not only in state institutions but also in the daily life of social arrangements (5). I would now like to delve into the forms of emancipation, in order to reflect on their possible crossings and collaborations and on the sense in which they involve corporealities, especially if one takes into account our current circumstances in the globalized world of late capitalism.

NOTES   *  In very specific, duly cited parts of this chapter, I revisit and further elaborate on some passages formulated in a previous text (Quintana 2016a); here, however, they are given a new focus that broadens and supplements them, according to my interests in this book and to what I specifically set out to do in this chapter.   1.  “A saturated structuring of the sensible order that places people and things in common according to a logic of places and identities” (Rancière 2016d, 150).   2.  Though this can only be argued further on. See chapter 4, section 2.   3.  Rancière uses the notion of “dispositif,” which, as we know, has a long tradition in French philosophy (see Revel 2002, 24; Deleuze 2006, 342), in a rather loose sense, to refer to aesthetic arrangements of heterogeneous elements that form part of distributions of the sensible. Thus, for example, he speaks of the “critical dispositif” (Rancière 2010a, 34), or of film or video dispositifs, of spatial and temporal dispositifs (see Rancière 2016d, 140). A clarification is necessary here: Julie Rose, the translator into English of La méthode de l’égalité, does not use the term “dispositif,” but rather, “apparatus” or, sometimes, “device.” Though I refer the reader to her translation, I have maintained the term “dispositif” in order to mark Rancière’s distance from Althusser’s notion of “apparatus,” while highlighting his proximity to the Deleuzian understanding of Foucault’s dispositif.   4.  I have generally translated the key notion of écart, which combines the ideas of “gap,” “separation,” and “interval” in a single word, as “interval” or “interstice,” given that Rancière uses it to refer to ruptures and transformations that break up the web of experience and rearticulate the elements and boundaries that make up those assemblages in other distributions that occur among and not beyond them. This is why, as Rancière points out, it is a key figure to indicate that the elements or multiplicities of a social assemblage do not feature a relationship of full correspondence among themselves (see Rancière 2016d, 62–63).   5.  In this respect, I agree with Chambers (see Chambers 2013, 62)



Mapping the Practices of Emancipation 43

 6. As is well known, this notion was introduced by Foucault, but Rancière mobilizes it differently. Foucault uses this notion to refer to other cultural and social spaces, within the given social orders (Foucault 1986), although he uses it for the first time in The Order of Things to allude to certain textual spaces, or, more specifically, to describe the effects of certain texts, which create impossible places that generate disorder and incongruence and for which it is impossible to find a “common space” (cf. Foucault 1970, xix). For Rancière, a heterotopia is the opening of other places and forms of perception in the places established for x or y; or, to put it in other terms, the aesthetic division of these places, practices, and forms of saying and feeling. Likewise, for Rancière, the heterotopia is the division of utopia into experiential intervals of bodies, which disrupt it and elicit transformative effects.   7.  Hence the importance for Rancière, as we shall see throughout the book, of different figures of the indeterminable; the incorporeal, the spectral, the logic of as if, which is also that which divides “the heterological” (see chapter 4) and heterochronic (see chapter 6).  8. Rancière introduces the idea of “specter” (spectre) to refer to the nature of emancipatory practices as interstices or intervals (écarts) (see Rancière 1998, 146–47). In this sense, the notion of specter is not meant to think the call of the absolute Other, but rather to consider different ways of “inscribing the part of the other” (Rancière 2010b, 60), any other. Furthermore, it is not a figure that completely exceeds a framework of experience, but that indicates the manner in which that framework may be pierced with intervals of that which takes and does not take place.   9.  From this, one can infer that “intellectual emancipation” does not refer to the power of intelligence over the body, but rather to a power of intelligence that is nothing other than a certain corporeal mobility. 10.  Thompson reaches a similar conclusion in The Making of the English Working Class (cf. Thompson 1963, 208). 11. In fact, in his research on everyday resistance in Sedaka (Malaysia), Scott questions the ideological determinism deriving from certain understandings of “­hegemony,” particularly from Althusser’s ideas of “false consciousness,” “mystification,” and “ideological apparatuses,” conceptual tools that, according to Scott, cannot account for class conflict in many different situations (Scott 1985, 320–50). 12.  Nevertheless, a clarification is called for here. It is one thing to speak of the autonomy of the moments of emancipation (as Rancière does) and another to assert the externality of those spaces with respect to the logics that produce domination (which Rancière questions). The whole idea of interval-gap that I have begun to insist on has to do precisely with this: the other spaces and moments (which must be conceived of in their singularity as others, and in that sense they are autonomous for Rancière) are produced by torsions, gaps, spacings, reconfigurations of those logics that also give rise to forms of domination. Therefore, they are not external to them. However, at times Scott does seem to identify the autonomy of subaltern spaces with their externality. 13.  María Inés Fernández has demonstrated this very well in her careful ethnography of the occupied Bruckman factory in Buenos Aires. As this researcher says, “I understand that one of the most substantive contributions made possible by the

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recovery of the companies is precisely demonstrating how work and politics were articulated in the everydayness of these experiences [. . .]. An effort was made to make daily life a process of continued construction in which its protagonists reinvented ways of doing politics and work, on the basis of their life experience. And this everyday life [. . .] did not occur at a ‘hidden’ level, but mainly in a ‘quotidian resistance,’ based on the public expression of practices of struggle rooted in labor” (Fernández 2017, 154–55). 14.  Here I am alluding indirectly to the case of the Argentinean “Siluetazo” (1983), which I shall revisit in chapter 4. 15. See http://humanismoyconectividad.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/subcomandante -marcos/. 16.  In Rancière’s words, “Politics has always been defined in terms of a polemic about the human [. . .]. Politics for me has always played out around these questions: are these humans true humans, do they belong to humanity, or are they half-human or falsely human? Are these people, who are making a noise with their mouths, speaking or not speaking? Politics has always been defined within a political relationship in which the dividing up of human beings is called into question, starting with the capacity of uncounted humans to get themselves counted by themselves declaring their membership and their capacity” (Rancière 2016d, 162). I shall return to this in chapter 4. 17.  In fact, when visiting the community in March 2017, one of its oldest leaders whom they call “el negro,” and who has survived several attacks and threats, told me that the community does not consider itself anti-state, but an advocate of the rule of law, which is inexistent in Colombia, where, as he and other members of the community said, “the State has been nothing but a narco-paramilitary State.” 18.  As Butler has argued interestingly in several of the essays of her recent book Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Butler 2015). 19.  But, as I shall argue in chapter 4, not in the sense of Laclau and Mouffe. 20.  In the following paragraph and as indicated in each reference, I draw on considerations set forth in Fjeld, Quintana, and Tassin (2016, 4–5).

Chapter 2

Intellectual Emancipation as the Torsion of a Body

Let us now dwell on that level of everyday transformations of bodies to which Rancière has granted such preeminence in his works. So much so that he has stated that his research is marked by a weakness: “the weakness of my work isn’t so much having sacrificed individual subjectivization to collective subjectivization, but the opposite—having thought of emancipation based on forms of self-transformation,” bearing in mind “what kind of body you build for yourself, what kind of attitude, what kind of daily life” (Rancière 2016c, 118). How would it be possible to think in depth this privilege granted to the daily transformations of bodies? In what sense is political emancipation reflected on from this perspective? Proletarian Nights, Louis Gabriel Gauny: Le philosophe plébéien, edited by Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and the essays collected in Short Voyages to the Land of the People provide several elements that can guide us when addressing these questions and unraveling everything that is at stake in these emancipation practices. Therefore, this chapter will focus on those early works in which Rancière began to examine the “imperceptible confrontations” generated by the everyday transformations of certain bodies, “the trace of those paths, the mark of their ruptures” (Rancière 2009a, 41), and their effects on a web of sensory perception. In those works, he also began to follow other paths of thought, other ways of thinking experience and its possibilities, and to displace boundaries. In fact, Rancière points out in some interviews that “there is a sort of reversal” in the usual interpretations of his work, because “my supposedly more poetic, more descriptive books are for me the true theory books, whereas other texts that adopt the demonstrative mode do so because they’re responding to specific demands,” and are, therefore, as he says, “rhetorical books,” aimed at providing emphatic responses (Rancière 2016c, 82). My objective is to 45

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turn that reversal around and take very seriously the production of theory in those early works: of “theory” in Rancière’s sense, that is, the way in which through the work of writing, these texts displace boundaries, find scenes and other modes of enunciation and relation, and reconfigure the landscape of the thinkable and sayable. The importance Rancière attributes to these writings contrasts with the scanty attention paid to them, particularly to Proletarian Nights, by commentators of his work. Of course these books are always mentioned in introductions to and monographs on the author, and brief commentaries of them are included.1 Nevertheless, this is always done in order to trace a path of thought in which those texts are seen merely as the preparatory stages of the philosophical elaboration developed in later theoretical works that have become part of “Rancière’s theoretical corpus,” widely consulted by philosophers, such as On the Shores of Politics (Aux bords du politique, 1990), Disagreement (La Mésentente, 1995), or the interview The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Le partage du sensible, 2000). This strange inattention limits the singularity of Rancière’s writing, his indisciplinary and experimental way of doing philosophy and theory, and the manner in which these more poetic or “descriptive” works produce concepts and other paths of thought. As I shall argue in this chapter, this situation may be partly due to the failure to address the centrality of the issue of corporeality in Rancière’s work. Furthermore, both of those omissions help foster problematic readings of emancipation in Rancière’s work: (1) voluntarist interpretations of intellectual emancipation as a liberation of the subjective will (see Nordmann 2006, 127) and (2) dichotomous interpretations of emancipation that see it as something insubstantial, in the sense that it would produce few significant effects for the world (see Hallward 2009; Myers 2016; Zivi 2016). Thinking emancipation from the perspective of corporeality and, more specifically, as torsion of a body makes it possible to counter the first reading and provides some elements to begin to challenge the latter.2 The idea is partly to address something that Karen Zivi (2016) finds lacking in Rancière’s thought: the consideration of the conditions for and possible effects of moments of political disruption (454). Therefore, this chapter aims to show that Rancière (2008b) has in fact thought about these conditions and elaborated on them based on an aesthetic understanding of emancipation that implies “shaping for oneself a new body and a new sensorium” (10), in the first place. In developing this aesthetic understanding of emancipation, I specifically aim to show that it is not just something performative in Butler’s sense (see Butler 1990, 1997a). Aesthetic emancipation is, above all, a body’s experimentation with its gestures, the language and affects it is exposed to, the spaces in which it moves, and the perception of its own movement.



Intellectual Emancipation as the Torsion of a Body 47

This exercise also produces subtle displacements in the manner of feeling, speaking, experiencing the world and the relation to others, which Rancière describes as a movement of torsion, and, more exactly, as a torsion that makes it possible to affirm what a body can do, thus destabilizing a series of boundaries that establish its impotence. In order to specify what is at stake in this movement of torsion, I will first dwell on a scene described by plebeian philosopher Louis Gabriel Gauny, which Rancière considers crucial to think the aesthetic dimension of emancipation, the corporeal displacements it produces, and the affective impulse it mobilizes. Second, I will focus on the material yet incorporeal figure of the écart (interstice or interval) as essential to thinking these dissensual displacements and the way in which they are closely related to the materiality of words. Next, I will reflect on the corporeal potency that is felt in these emancipatory practices, in order to consider how it can be deployed in different languages, and also as a common power that allows for singular verifications of equality, always confronted with the factuality of given circumstances. I will then specify the sense in which this movement of torsion may be thought as a conversion of oneself and examine some of its paths and implications. Finally, I shall discuss some of the possible effects of reading intellectual emancipation as a torsion of a body. My concern in this chapter is not to introduce Rancière directly into the complex ongoing epistemological and ontological discussion on corporeality and embodiment (see Noland 2009; Gonzalez-Arnal et al. 2012). Rather, I provide a reading that allows for an aesthetic understanding of corporeality, an approach that questions a series of boundaries that fix bodies to dichotomous distributions between the given and the acquired, the natural and the cultural, the material and the ideal, the mind and the body, spirit and matter. As I shall argue later, according to this aesthetic understanding, the body is not entirely determinable by those practices that condition it (as in certain culturalist versions like Bourdieu’s [1988]); rather, it can de-determine itself on the basis of those practices, thus opening up dissensus between two sensorial regimes: on the one hand, the forms of objectivization and disciplining that subject bodies and close off their experience, and on the other hand, practices in which they can turn back on their own movements, on what they do, in order to assert the potency of that mobility.3 This type of dissensus produces the opening up of intervals amidst subjections, of interstices whose materiality is that of the incorporeal, which can drive qualitative transformations of bodies.4 In some places, Rancière links this incorporeal potency to the force of the as if: of all those manifestations that seem to have no existence, when considered according to certain parameters, but that act as if they did (­Rancière 2009c, 8).

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2.1.  TORSIONS OF BODIES 2.1.1.  The Separation of Gaze and Hands The scene I referred to above appears repeatedly, almost obsessively, in ­Rancière’s reflections (see Rancière 2004a, 199; 2008a, 68; 2012b, 81): Believing himself at home, so long as he has not finished laying the floor, he loves the arrangement of a room. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination toward the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighboring residences. (Gauny 1983, 46)

This scene, described by plebeian philosopher Louis Gabriel Gauny, also a joiner, makes it possible to appreciate the manner in which emancipation begins with “a tiny modification in the posture of a body” that displaces the (mechanical) movement, the (utilitarian) task, the position (of adjustment), and the expectations (of efficiency) that had been assigned to it (Rancière 2009b, 117). The way in which Gauny, with his compelling and expressive poeticism, prepares this scene and what follows from it turns out to be crucial when inquiring into that which is at stake in this subtle yet significant modification and, therefore, deserves further attention. We discover, first of all, that the scene involves a piece worker (ouvrier tâcheron) and that, as we can glean from both Rancière and textual indications, it is Gauny himself, now speaking in third person. He is a worker who compensates for the uncertainty of his trade by feeling at home (chez lui) in the independence of his solitary work, where the movements of his body are not subjected to the gaze of a foreman or master builder, or to the predetermined pace that forces day laborers to interrupt “their conversations in order to run under the yoke” of the “striking of the clock” (Gauny 1983, 45). Thanks to that solitude, the joiner seems to be able to connect with the movement of his body, the same movement required by his work, in a different way. This movement, when felt in its cadence, can attract and impassion the worker, as if it were an external force, as if the movement of appropriation of its gestures by the body also made that body feel other, attracted by its very gestuality. But it also feels other in the effort that might entail its subjection, instead of merely trying to escape from it: On the job, one effort excites another, the movements follow one another in a straight and spirited way. Lured toward the conclusion of the work, he is taken up by the charm as he kills boredom: that awful cancer that gnaws the soul of the day laborer. (Gauny 1983, 45; quoted in Rancière 2012b, 79)

What kind of boredom is this and how can we situate ourselves in this apparently traditional dichotomous language that makes a distinction between



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body, spirit, and soul? The words in which Gauny continues creating the scene give us some clues that might be significant when comparing them with the testimonies and the poetic-narrative weave of Proletarian Nights. The first thing that stands out is that this passionate connection with the body in its solitude does not presuppose a disconnection from the strain of the effort, but rather the opposite: As he gives air to his thinking every day, the floor-layer mortifies his body more and more [. . .]. The craft bends this man under violent hardships that must be experienced to be appreciated. For it is crawling along on his knees that he lays the floor, tormented by the work, enchanted by the liberty! He mortifies his body to give flight to his soul. (Gauny 1983, 45; quoted in Rancière 2012b, 80)

What is going on in this movement that seems to suggest a passionate asceticism? What sort of freedom is it? Perhaps it is more than the mortification of the flesh in order to elevate the spirit. The freedom of the body is produced in its maximum effort and strain, because solitude allows it not only to feel that effort as mobility, as a composite gestuality, with its rhythms, forces, and vibrations, but also to experience the materiality of the effort, its burden and violence, as well as the manner in which the body resists them. Thus, in this composite, complex, and arduous movement, the body seems to feel everything it can do, a potency it feels with delight and a certain pleasure. It is as if, in Rancière’s (1983) words, “the curved roads of re-appropriation of the self” also occurred in “the very alienation of exploited labor” (15). It is also as if the body, in feeling the material effort of its activity, ceased to be absent, stopped living itself merely as an objectified body, reified by certain regulations, and began feeling itself as a lived body,5 no longer as an observed but as an observing body that perceives its movements with pleasure, in turning back on them and what they entail (cf. Rancière 1983, 15). It would seem that the body, on the basis of this lived experience of connection that occurs in solitude, could also become absorbed in its thoughts, as if thought required a reconnection with the body, its rhythms, its gestures, and its mobility, thus going against the grain of a long metaphysical tradition. Even more, it is as if thought were this very mobility, reexperienced with pleasure by a body, in its different possibilities of movement, detention, disjunction, exploration, and observation. This is what Gauny (1983) suggests, “Almost always alone in the work entrusted to him, solitude protects his meditation, since nothing distracts him from his thoughts” (45). What sort of thought could absorb him so? Precisely the one evoked in the scene with which we began this section: the movement of disjunction between gaze and hands, the detention of the arms that directs the gaze toward the space it occupies, to the layout of the parquet that the joiner himself has laid, to

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the garden that can be seen outside the window, to the spacious perspective that appears before it. This disjunction, we must insist, has nothing to do with the (contemplative) gaze that separates itself from the (manual) activity of the arms, but rather the opposite. It is the disconnection from a habitual, functional corporeal assemblage that denies contemplation to manual work, a disconnection from functionality that makes it possible to experience the movement of manual work as detention and movement of the body. In the movement of the body and its effort, the body reexperiences the space it moves in, which makes it suspend the effort and, at the same time, allows it to appropriate its mobility while leading it out of itself, in a sort of expropriating appropriation. It is as if the body, once it has disconnected itself from its mere functionality, now connected to its movement and observing and feeling what it does, could also attend to the appearance of the world by suspending its habitual distraction (a functional distraction when fulfilling its daily tasks) from that which appears. As Rancière insists (see Rancière 1983, 15), this is what Kant elaborated on in the Critique of Judgment with the idea of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic gaze. This disinterestedness, as an openness that encourages the joiner and drives him to see, is anything but indifference; rather, it makes the sensory fabric of experience interesting and significant, causing boredom to fade away. This boredom is, according to Gauny, an affect that consumes the body of those condemned to disgusting work, given the long workdays imposed by such jobs. It “torments the limbs and the spirit” of the worker, who endures “the bodily positions” required by his trade as something “irritating.” As Gauny continues, “Everything within him yearns to escape from him and head out for some unknown that is desired as happiness and good fortune. Evening falls, and his soul wears itself out counting the minutes” (Gauny 1983, 43; my emphasis; Rancière 2012b, 66). Resonating with something that appears later in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, it is “work compounded of [. . .] obliviousness” (Rancière 2012b, 59), the “oblivion of oneself.” Those who, given the constrictions of their occupation, experience boredom doing their jobs are precisely those who cannot connect to the lived experience of their body, those who feel their body is absent, so that all they want to do is to escape from their situation, their reality, and to forget it. So much so that day laborers might feel that their hellish condition is due to the fact that their existence has the consistency of absence; of feeling that they do not have the possibility of living a “true life” (Rancière 2012b, 18). Thus, boredom seems to be that which prevents a body from breaking away from its habitual positions, from fracturing the assemblage of expected gestures, that is, from thinking, understood as the possibility of feeling more intensely the mobility of a body and what it can do.



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Thus, “the consumed soul of the day-laborer,” the soul that is not allowed to be and that wears itself away, might be precisely the difference of the body with respect to itself. This difference may arise in the interstices of the not completely regulated time of an occupation that allows for intermittences. That is why the worker, who has to work ten straight hours, with regulated pauses, feels that those ten hours “loom ahead to devour his soul” (Rancière 2012b, 58). Nevertheless, he encourages himself by humming old songs in a sudden fit of happiness, an “impromptu murmur of the body [. . .] slipping from remembrance” that Gauny perceives as “a song of rebellion that simulates a fusillade” (61). That difference without a concrete reference, without a fixed presence, emerges as already almost defeated in the compelled body doomed to the incessant and continued repetition of its regulations, yet arising anyway. This difference may be thought of as a certain very material incorporeality that can pass through, fracture, divert, and alter bodies. Perhaps this material incorporeality can make the body feel “that it is destined to something other than domination” (Rancière 2008a, 69), and that what is really intolerable about it has to do above all with the “pain of stolen time” (Rancière 1981, 7):6 the pain of not having time to turn back on himself and what he does, to displace and divide himself. As Rancière shows in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, this division of the body with respect to itself is also the strength, the potency of desire, which allows a body to act upon itself and venture forth into other possibilities, as I will explain further on. Returning to the scene described by Gauny, what it also tells us is that in a single stroke, the gaze is displaced from the spacious perspective it enjoys from the window, to other spaces, to “the monuments and the prisons, the tumultuous city and its ramparts, the wisps of umbrage beyond the walls and the venturesome clouds in the infinite atmosphere” (Gauny 1983, 46; Rancière 2012b, 87), to the borders of the city, to the enclosures, and to that which escapes them, with a fragile and gaseous existence. Amidst the vast perspectives that attract him, the floor-layer suddenly sees “two blots of shadow,” “two of the buildings that the spirit of enterprise and the spirit of reform have succeeded in erecting in these years: the factory and the cellular prison” (Rancière 2012b, 87). These two shadows remain in his imagination when he resumes his work: He goes back to work, but his soul reflects the things going on outside better than a mirror, because it passes through the stones; he perceives the abominations they hide. The prisoners in their stifling cells and the hirelings consumed by factories sweep him into humanitarian fits of rage in which their indignation, accusing society, makes him forget the splendors of space and suffer from the evil he has seen. (Gauny 1983, 46; quoted in Rancière 2012b, 87)

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In that displacement of corporeality, it seems that the contemplation of what appears also entails a movement of imagination (as Gauny lets us know without having read Kant), and that this movement creates a connection with both one’s own pain and that of others. The disconnection from a habitual way of living the world (organic, functional performance of certain tasks that distract bodies from their corporeal facticity) makes it possible to see differently: to see the world and its obstacles in a broader manner, see what can take place beyond them and also imagine what he cannot see—the pain he is experiencing. It is the possibility of approaching a pain that concerns him, that affects him and causes indignation, because he recognizes that it is a shared pain, a common pain that concerns “society” and the way in which the world seems to function. It is perhaps the pain of the “intolerable” (cf. Rancière 2012b, 87). And this pain affects him: it remains in his body, in his movements, and in his thought, driving his desires. For that reason, while he joins pieces of parquetry, the more “his reflection endeavors to find the junctures of our pains, the more his desire imagines common domains for populations yet to come” (Gauny 1983, 46). The image of the intolerable, which Gauny relates especially to the figure of the cellular prison, is the image of the confinement of bodies, their isolation, and the total loss of their own time and space. But this image does not deter the floor-layer; rather, it moves him and encourages him to get to know it better, to conceive it as something that he somehow shares, and also to imagine a rupture with the world that causes it to exist. This is the beginning of a sort of militant passion that disturbs him and moves him incessantly in his wandering around the city. This is why, as Rancière says in Proletarian Nights, his “curiosity [reaches] the pitch of a fixed idea or obsession,” and makes him prowl around the neighborhood of one of the model prisons, La Roquette, and finally manages to get in. Upon entering, the visitor gets to see “all the spokes of this wheel of torture” (Rancière 2012b, 88): surveillance as torment.7 In Gauny’s words, No break in the walls, nothing filters through, everything gets lost. One senses there that tidiness and regularity are deadly. The air, circulating comfortably there, reeks of the base tyranny in the divisibility of its powers. One walks without calling up any echoes. Before the jailers, the objects make signs to keep silent and give the order to suffer. The outside oxygen [. . .] is sanctimoniously replaced by an air-intake setup that, through the arrangement of its flow, loses the voice of the prisoner if he attempts to communicate into his opening. (Gauny 1983, 73; quoted in Rancière 2012b, 88)

The device described by Gauny as the image of the intolerable is a space whose architecture, its spatial and temporal distributions, does not allow



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for what flows among them, that which can escape: the air, echoes, voices, bonds, and contacts are all passages that require fissures and interstices that they can go through. The neatness and regularity involved here are aimed at neutralizing the possibility that something unforeseeable might occur among those bodies, and even in their own gestures, thus denying them any chance of alteration. For this very reason, it is a construction of space that seeks to cut off relations among objects as well—their cold, uniform, preestablished layout silences and prevents singular arrangements and adjustments that might prove to be significant. Here, the voices, in plain view of the bodies that might produce them, are suffocated, and words, in their singularity, are buried and cannot be heard. In this sense, as Rancière (2012b) says, for Gauny, “the panoptic setup is designed not so much to ensure that the penitentiary apparatus can keep tabs on the prisoners’ deeds and gestures as it is to strip them of anything that escapes knowing, anything that allows them to exist elsewhere or otherwise than in the gaze of the master” (89). It is, thus, a device of d­ ispossession of the possibilities of movement and alteration of a body, a device that seeks to erase any space for ambiguity or opacity, where “no obscurity permits meditation to escape,” where no “complicity” in relations is allowed, and where there is no chance of enjoying the desire or the hope that another world is possible. It is thus “a world without fissures or interstices through which liberty, or merely the dream of it, could pass” (Rancière 2012b, 90). Thus far, the following very significant elements for the interpretation I propose have appeared: (1) Emancipation begins with a subtle displacement of a body in which it “reappropriates” its mobility and lived experience, an appropriation that is also an expropriation. (2) This mobility is inhibited by dominations that steal away from a body a time and space that is its own and would allow it to turn back on itself. (3) This turning back upon itself of a body, however, can also throw it out of itself toward other spaces and trigger a reflection on that which robs bodies of their mobility, their possibility of displacement, their freedom, and, therefore, their desire for a different world. (4) In this sense, reflection and judgment regarding the world has to do with reconfigurations that can occur in a corporeality, in its relation to times and spaces, and to the manner in which it can expose itself to its difference. This, of course, is very significant for critical agency and everything it entails. (5) Along these same lines, it would be possible to think that “the reason for militant passion” is not “the awareness” of a reality heretofore unknown, or the “solidarity” among workers, but “the desire to see what happens on the other side, the desire to initiate another life,” that is, an impulse or transformative force (Rancière 2009a, 38). (6) Gauny’s reflections suggest that the body is not conceived merely as a material-natural datum, nor as a surface on which the social meanings that shape it are inscribed and which the body

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reiterates once and again, as in certain constructivist understandings. Gauny’s conception is, rather, that of an affective body of experience, capable of creating disjunctions and displacements between its movements and that which is usually expected of them. Finally, it is highly significant that (7) the freedom of bodies is related to those disjunctions and displacements, to the opening up of interstices between what they do and what they see, between movement and detention, between the fissures and opacities left by forms of subjection and through which complicities, exchanges, desires, dreams, affects (passions, attractions, indignations) can flow, with unexpected effects. The fact that freedom has to do with the interstice for both Rancière and Gauny is crucial and its implications deserve to be pursued. We could begin by saying that the scene described by Gauny already shows that the interstice has to do with crossing boundaries: boundaries of sense and sensibility (of perception and sensation) that delimit what a body can and cannot do. For example, it is crossing the boundary between passivity and activity, the moment when the most hardworking body (who is expected merely to fulfill a task obediently, docilely, passively) comes to a halt and, in doing so, may become very active and indocile and already act in a certain way by merely seeing. We could say that it is also displacing the boundary between the body’s manual and intellectual (thought) activities, since the body that is most aware of its corporeal strengths is precisely the one that ends up most invested in the movement of thought. And it is also destabilizing the boundary between freedom and necessity, since those who are most aware of the extent to which they are conditioned by the activity and physical effort of the body are also those who can move and displace themselves, thus asserting their power. Furthermore, it is crossing the boundary between imagination and reality, since those who embark on the exercise of their imagination can have a different type of contact with their given reality and experience an uneasiness that drives them to pursue the unseen in that reality. Finally, it is the displacement of boundaries between the unique and the common, given that the body that is aware of the singularity of its situation and of what appears from its perspective can also see its pain from a broader perspective, perceiving the connection with other pains in the “junctures” that evince a common pain. 2.1.2.  The Interstice and the Materiality of Words If there is anything that Proletarian Nights invites us to think about, it is precisely this crossing of boundaries and with it, the gap, the intervals, as a condition for emancipatory movements. This book makes it possible to think the interstice in its full materiality by focusing on the testimonies of the “divided” rather than “concrete” figures it presents, whose “divided” character stems



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from the fact that they seem to exceed any definable image or figure of the “worker” and the “proletarian.” Nevertheless, it is not easy to make visible the materiality of that which has no identifiable place or position, nor the texture of the determinable, of that which seems imperceptible yet leaves its marks. Proletarian Nights traces these marks of figures “that confront their image and expel its concept” (Rancière 2009a, 37). Those marks are the texts of the proletarians who speak in a unique manner throughout the book’s narrative weave. Thanks to the narrative texture of the book, their words appear as an event and the interstice may be perceived as evental.8 In order to allow the force of these testimonies to emerge, it is essential to inscribe their interstitial character in the book itself. For Rancière, a sociological explanation of the testimonies or their insertion in the established history of social movements would present them as something attributable to social causes, as something to be expected given certain life conditions, and not as events (Rancière 2009a, 75). Above all, Rancière tried to avoid the discourse of inequality, the discourse of the “underdogs,” who express themselves in a manner that irreducibly distances them from the explanatory discourse that would endow it with sense, as well as the discourse of identity, aimed at presenting the voice of the underdog in its bare essence. Respecting the event thus entailed avoiding an identifying discourse, in order to present the processes of de-identification of divided bodies, bodies that enter into conflict with what is expected of them and produce disjunctions between their words, gestures, dreams, and the manner in which they tend to be fixed and inscribed in certain forms of embodiment: Accounting for the constitution of a network of illegitimate discourses that break up a certain identity, a certain relation between bodies and words. Therefore, I had to describe it differently in order to give back to that universe of words its unauthorized and, at the same time, lacunary, character, and to give back to those experiences all of their ambiguity and undecidability. (Rancière 2009a, 75–76)

The lacunary, ambiguous, and undecidable character of those words has to do precisely with their being interstitial, with the fact that, given their illegitimacy and their constantly overstepping established and authorized circuits, positions, and forms of enunciation, they cross borders and refuse to belong to any territory in which they can be identified. Thus, the potency of thinking without affiliations is simply asserted through this interstitial no-place. ­Proletarian Nights must then provide an account of those crossings in accordance with that affirmation of equality. And it does so by subverting the hierarchy of discourses and opting for a poetic language situated at the same level of the testimonies under study. The book, therefore, refuses a hermeneutics of suspicion that reactivates the division of intellects. Neither the testimonies

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nor the images gathered are symptoms or an archive that needs to be delved into. The objective is, rather, to see how the images and figures move, how they divide and alter themselves in very material passages, in interstices that affect their way of life, their parameters of perception, the rhythm of their movements, their ways of relating to them, and their affects. To embrace these movements of de-identification, the book departs from the unity of the text as an organic body (in the style of Plato) produced by a multiplicity of voices, in order to conceive itself as a “story,” a “narrative,” in which it is possible to hear “voices that gradually shape a collective space” (Rancière 2009a, 76). Proletarian Nights is, therefore, also driven by the need to reconfigure the sayable, the landscape of the evident found in the figures it addresses. The book displaces the boundaries between orality and writing, between text and image, which results in a reconfiguration of the sayable, of a given discursive space, since it is not separable from the reconfiguration of the identities that appear in its narrative texture. The divided figures presented in the book are errant figures, bodies that “cross the borders that define the identities” assigned to them, and it is precisely in that wandering, in that movement without a set destination, that they emancipate themselves (Rancière 2009a, 573). Proletarian Nights is particularly concerned with these subtle subversions that occurred when several workers belonging to the Saint-Simonian utopian movement decided to put their nights to other uses. According to Rancière, this is the beginning of a subversion of the world, because it disrupts the succession of work and rest that ensures productivity and offers resistance to having time stolen away. The workers seek space for their own time, in which something other than work and rest may occur. Their nights are dedicated to deploying other capacities that do not seem to be “typical” of the proletarian condition, such as founding newspapers and writing for them, discussing and writing poetry, reading philosophy, and philosophizing. Thus, they carry out an experiential questioning of the hierarchy between manual worker and thinker; the (Platonic, Aristotelian) hierarchy (reiterated by Bourdieu9 and our society of experts) between a body destined to “mere survival,” endowed with the inarticulate voice of suffering and pleasure (the mere illegitimate doxa of the practical man “immersed in necessity” and, therefore, allegedly incapable of deliberating and understanding the just), and the body that can be “more than body,” capable of achievements, of articulated discourse, and of giving an account of the just and the real. Now then, these figures clearly show that those displacements of bodies and their transformations have to do with the materiality of words, that is, with the manner in which the latter can push bodies, put them into contact, divide them. In fact, most of these workers, initially attracted by some utopia, particularly Saint-Simonianism, were involved in the workers’ struggles that



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took place between 1831 and 1833. At the beginning, these workers were interpellated by the inventors, the poets, the lovers of the people and the Republic, the organizers of the cities of the future, and the apostles of new religions. The worker needs all of these people, not to gain scientific or scholarly knowledge of his condition, but to entertain and maintain his passions and desires for another world. Otherwise the constraints of labor will level them down to the mere instinct for survival and subsistence. (Rancière 2012b, 20–21)

Those words can activate the force of desire, the desire of another world able to divert bodies from what they regularly and habitually do. These words also produce dealings and contacts among bodies, among different social affiliations and environments, and are often unidentifiable. They are written words that have neither an owner nor a fixed meaning: texts that circulate and are borrowed or translated. They are words that can pierce bodies, unleashing affects and transforming them, as, once again, Gauny attests to: “Plunge into terrible readings. That will awaken passions in your wretched existence, and the laborer needs them to stand tall in the face of that which is ready to devour him” (Rancière 2012b, 19). Gauny thus recognizes that power of words to affect bodies: what Rancière has elsewhere called “literarity”: the capacity of locutions to “take hold of bodies and divert them from their end” (Rancière 2004c, 39). How is it possible for words to have such power of affectation? This power has to do partly with what Rancière has called, for example, in The Names of History, the excess of words. This excess refers to the manner in which words can always be appropriated and translated in unforeseen ways: In a way, excess is always linked to a duality, to a difference; it’s always a nonconcordance. Excess is not an excessive, destructive ontological power. There is excess to the extent that we can say there are multiplicities, sets that don’t correspond to each other. Between the multiplicity of names and the multiplicity of bodies, there is no concordance, and politics is possible because of this nonconcordance. (Rancière 2016c, 62)

The excess of words and the different forms of appropriation and effects they may produce have to do with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of social formations as assemblages, as articulations of elements and relations that never fully correspond, even when full correspondence is sought in their heterogeneity (from the perspective a police logic). For this same reason, there can never be full correspondence between the multiplicity of names and the multiplicity of bodies. No discourse corresponds to one body; there is no form of speaking that corresponds to workers, peasants, bourgeois, women, or men.

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A body can always speak, write, and appropriate words in ways that it is not expected to, thus exceeding its alleged positions of enunciation. In this sense, we could also say that words, bodies, and their relations are always in excess: words emerge, here and there, that always exceed their most habitual uses and are not classifiable according to a given regime of sense. There are always bodies that exceed the established forms of being counted as certain types of bodies, and there are unclassifiable words that also contribute to the declassification, de-identification, and disincorporation of bodies. These words, particularly literary words, can have a great power to affect and divert bodies. They are locutions that reject any fixed sense, that produce intensities, vibrations, and rhythms, “insofar as they are not bodies in the sense of organisms, but quasi-bodies” with an “undecided corporeality” (Rancière 1998, 131): words that cannot be identified with anything given, living, organic. They are mute words, without a father or an addressee, exposed to appropriation by anyone and to appropriating anyone. They can produce other rhythms, other trajectories, other accelerations and decelerations, thus disrupting the functionality assigned to the gestures and organized pace of bodies dedicated to production and reproduction. This means that they can produce separations in bodies, lines of fracture in the arrangements or assemblages that constitute them, discordances between their ways of doing and being, between what they usually do and feel, thus opening up other possibilities of perception. It is perhaps the effect of poetry highlighted by Gauny when he states that “the real hell [is] the world without poetry”: Sublime unfortunates! You did not know the sorrow of sorrows, the vulgar sorrow of the lion caught in a trap, of the commoner subjected to horrible sessions in the workshop, the penitentiary expedient gnawing away at spirit and body with boredom and the folly of long labor. Ah, Dante, you old devil, you never traveled to the real hell, the hell without poetry! Adieu! (Rancière 2012b, 17)

The poetic word disrupts habitual usage and fills “the ordinary phrase” with “enigmatic phrases” that cause unprecedented images to emerge, the unknown within the known, thus fostering the exploration of the unsaid within the said. This indeterminate, lacunary, interstitial, and adventurous (exploratory) character of poetry, which has very material effects regarding the affects it may produce, is perhaps “incorporeal materiality” (see Foucault 1972, 231), that is, the evental character of an enunciation that exceeds what is given as real, but that can subtly disturb bodies by moving and affecting them. Taking up some considerations from the previous section, we could thus say that if poetry elevates the soul of the proletarians who dedicate their nights to reading and writing poems, it is not so much because it separates them from the materiality of their bodies. Rather, this “elevation” occurs



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because poetry divides that materiality, disassembling it into positions, gestures, rhythms, and phrases that do not correspond to the usual and expected ones, thus triggering the desire for other rhythms, other positions, other phrases, other worlds, and other possible assemblages. This effect of the incorporeal is also essential when reflecting on the power of affectation of utopias. As both good-places and no-places, utopias may be appropriated by political actors in order to imagine and assert other possibilities of being (asserting them as no-places that inspire and move). In turn, these possibilities can destabilize the regulating aspiration that utopias (as “good places”) also have of adjusting the real to a project still to be carried out. To that extent, actors may divide the utopia and assume it as a montage of signs, which, as we shall see, is something also emphasized by Jacotot, a montage that may be mobilized in order to create other arrangements of bodies and their ways of relating, in opposition to those established as necessary. In this sense, political actors can turn the utopia into a heterotopia, into a logic of the other that makes it possible to imagine and experience other places, rhythms, times, and affects for bodies—other, with respect to the dominations they suffer most: “Living outside oneself, for others or in the ideal world of utopia, was the condition for experiencing the enjoyment of one who lives without a master” (Rancière 2012b, 430). This is why when Rancière looks retrospectively at his book on those errant proletarians he states, In Proletarian Nights, I analysed [. . .] the complex encounter between workers and the engineers of utopia. What the Saint-Simonian engineers proposed was a new, real body for the community where the water and rail routes marked out on the ground would take the place of paper dreams and the illusions of speech. The workers, for their part, did not set practice in contrast with utopia; they conferred upon the latter the characteristic of being “unreal,” of being a montage of words and images appropriate for reconfiguring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible. (Rancière 2004c, 40–41)

Thus, certain locutions make it possible to open up intervals-gaps in what is established as real, intervals in which bodies escape, displace, and reinvent themselves, through desires that bring about new forms of relating to one another and in which they feel exposed, “outside themselves,” and, at the same time, fragile, contingent, vulnerable, always on the verge of surrendering and feeling defeated. Hence, their materiality. This is, however, the materiality of the no-place, the indeterminable nowhere of the interval and its power to reconfigure the visible, the thinkable, and the possible, even when their effects seem to be imperceptible or devoured by the weight of “­reality.” As proletarian Sophie Béranger puts it, “Although I have lived more on dreams than on realities, I fear illusions. I destroy them by analyzing them, given that age has calmed my passions. But I have enough left to satisfy the

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optimism that colors my disappointments and sustains me” (Rancière 2012b, 430). We might even say that there is a certain materiality or effectiveness of illusion, not only because of the collective desires it can generate of another world, through utopian struggles and their heterotopias, but also due to the collective struggles it can give rise to. This materiality of illusion also has to do with the manner in which it can affectively bolster everydayness, by mitigating the nihilism and tedium of routine daily life: the boredom of that domestic, hygienic “real, practical life” that proletarian Désirée Veret found so difficult (see Rancière 2012b, 430), but which she resisted and reconfigured in order to give life to dreams that might at some point transform the shape of her days. The interstice appears then at the intersection and mismatch of different logics: between the regularized routine of “practical life” and the utopian dreams of another world that could pierce it. The interstice, however, is not opened up by the mere power of words; it is always the word together with gestures, rhythms, and images. It is always a matter of mismatches among them, of intervals, of the in between, created amidst the dissonance of words, gestures, and forms of spatialization, as well as of crossings among different languages of bodies that can affect one another because, in their incommensurability, they are translatable, albeit with frictions and remains. This language of bodies and its translatability is a crucial issue for Joseph Jacotot, as attested to in Rancière’s singular translation of the ignorant schoolmaster’s archive. 2.1.3.  The Languages of Bodies The poor people who live outside of Grenoble work at making gloves; they are paid thirty cents a dozen. Since they became emancipated, they work hard at looking at, studying, and understanding a well-made glove. They will understand the meaning of all the sentences, all the words of the glove. They will end up speaking as well as the city women who earn seven francs a dozen. One has only to learn a language spoken with scissors, needle, and thread. It is merely a question (in human societies) of understanding and speaking a language. (Jacotot, quoted in Rancière 1991, 37)

In order to assert the “fundamental and absent” principle of equality of intellects, Jacotot’s dissonant voice tells us that bodies and activities speak to us. This means that bodies may verify the capacity and power of their intellect through manifestations that are habitually recognized as “intelligent,” as well as through unprecedented expressions that could not be foreseen or were not acknowledged as appreciable capacities within the established social institutions and practices. Therefore, in order to leave open the manners in which verification of equality can occur, it is necessary to assume the latter as an indeterminable assumption that is neither formal nor real, but that has



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an effective incorporeality. Thus, assuming it has effects although it cannot acquire a determined form. Bodies and their activities speak, says Jacotot, suggesting that the ability to weave is at the same intellectual level as producing conceptual arguments. Consequently, it makes no sense to establish those hierarchies prevailing in the tradition of humanist thought between manual and intellectual activities, between the mute movement and inarticulate voice of bodies and the articulated language of the spirit. These activities that “speak,” according to Jacotot, are always practices that produce arrangements, systems of signs (in a very broad sense) that are different yet translatable among themselves, systems made up of gestures, rhythms, regularities, and routines, which can be more or less elaborate and can be observed, followed, and learned. In this manner, Jacotot emphasizes that bodies are always capable of learning and unlearning many things, and, on that basis, of doing many other things as well. Ever since childhood, bodies display the power of mobility, attention, observation, retention (when learning their native language, daily rituals, prayers, etc.) required to produce both sophisticated demonstrations and well-made gloves and shoes as soft as gloves. Intelligence has to do with attitudes and movements of bodies and their reflexivity (with being able to “turn back on themselves” and “on what they do,” as Gauny said): with “observing,” “retaining,” “repeating,” “showing,” “looking back at what is done,” “remembering,” “guessing,” displaying “absolute attention for seeing and seeing again, for saying and repeating” (Rancière 1991, 23). These capacities are of the same order and level, and, therefore, part of the same power, given that “power cannot be divided up” and no ability is superior to another: “inventing is not of another order than remembering” (25): “There is only one power, that of seeing and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says” (27). At stake in intellectual emancipation is the movement of a body “taking possession of its own power” (10). The first step is to pay maximum attention. The emancipatory movement begins when, for example, the illiterate person concentrates, with full attention, “on studying, word by word, the relation between the prayer he knows by heart and the text shown to him on paper” (Rancière et al. 2009), and which he cannot read at first. However, they are assemblages of signs that can be learned and translated; there is nothing else, either above or behind them: “There are signs that a hand traced on paper, signs whose type was assembled by a hand at the printer’s” (Rancière 1991, 23). This affirms the communicability among all activities, through which human beings, in some way or another, communicate their affects, what they can do. In this sense, Jacotot states that the human being “communicates through the work of his hands just as through the words of his speech” (Rancière 1991, 65). But that which is communicated are not meanings to be found; what occurs, rather,

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is the “making common” (in the etymological sense) of traced signs that can interpellate and be read by others along unexpected paths and can also display other unprecedented powers and affects. Although there is no “something” definite to understand here or seek behind the signs, they cannot be read any which way: the manner in which they are traced also sets some conditions of legibility, a legibility that, nevertheless, has the openness of writing, of a trace that can be reappropriated by others in multiple ways according to Jacotot’s anti-Platonic stance, and, thus, as the blueprint for possible paths of freedom. They are paths that reaffirm the shared power of intelligence, ways of life that display the localized and plastic movement of the body. There is nothing to “understand” that cannot be understood in an unexpected manner; one has only to translate one system of signs into another systems of signs, through whatever path one finds suitable in order to appropriate a certain system of signs: “all words, written or spoken, are a translation that only takes on meaning in the counter-translation” (Rancière 1991, 64), that is, in the (also gestural) readings of those traces, in the relations that may be drawn on the basis of (remembering) the signs one knows: The locksmith who calls the letter O “the round” and L “the square” is already thinking about relations. And inventing is not of another order than remembering. Let the explicators “form” the children’s “taste” and “imagination”; let them expound on the “genius” of creators. We will be content to do as creators do: like Racine who memorized, translated, repeated, and imitated Euripides; Bossuet, who did the same with Tertullian; Rousseau with Amyot; Boileau with Horace and Juvenal [. . .]. Power cannot be divided up. There is only one power, that of saying and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says. One learns sentences and more sentences; one discovers facts, that is, relations between things, and still other relations that are all of the same nature; one learns to combine letters, words, sentences, ideas. (Rancière 1991, 26)

Thus, we think in terms of relations, because to begin with, we are already moving within relations that we can appropriate and reappropriate, and the memory of bodies is also made up of relations of elements that may be rearticulated with other barely known or hardly identifiable ones. We think by creating relations on the basis of established relations, and creating is being able to establish other relations on the basis of those already appropriated. There is no static, homogeneous corporeal memory, but rather heterogeneous, relational, arrangements inscribed in bodies, which can be disassembled and reassembled. Neither is there any mystery of creation nor a powerful creative subject. There is greater or lesser attention, greater or lesser recognition of the common power of seeing, attending to, exploring relations, greater or lesser mobility of desire, and desire to exercise a body that folds and unfolds in that exercise. But there is no greater or lesser capacity. Emphasizing that we move



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in assemblages of signs is also essential when rethinking the experience of impotence and dealing with it: we must learn to say that incapacity, translate it into some system of established signs, that is, into some capacity. Thus, by creating continuity between the differentiating levels established by the logics of inequality, it is possible to break the circle of impotence. Establishing those continuities or relations creates spirals that open-displacedistance-space themselves from within the circle (s’écartant is the French term containing the notion of écart) distance-gap-interstice, thereby piercing it with gaps (see Rancière et al. 2009). The circle in which the boundaries between capacity/incapacity, knowledge/ignorance confine bodies is fixed by those distributions of sense and perception proclaimed by explicators, progressive sociologists, empowering militants, humanitarian bureaucracies, victimizing treatments, the society of experts, etc. This circle arising out of incapacity (due to deprivation, precarity, need, or ignorance) reproduces that capacity indefinitely. 2.1.4.  The Potency of Bodies Once more universal teaching proclaims: an individual can do anything he wants. But we must not mistake what wanting means. Universal teaching is not the key to success granted to the enterprising who explore the prodigious powers of the will. Nothing could be more opposed to the thought of emancipation than that advertising slogan. And the Founder became irritated when disciples opened their school under the slogan, “Whoever wants to is able to.” [. . .] What interests us is the exploration of powers of any man when he judges himself equal to everyone else and judges everyone else equal to him. By the will we mean that self-reflection by the reasonable being who knows himself in the act. It is this threshold of rationality, this consciousness of and esteem for the self as a reasonable being acting, that nourishes the movement of the intelligence. The reasonable being is first of all a being who knows his power, who doesn’t lie to himself about it. (Rancière 1991, 56–57)

But what power is this? To what extent does that official, voluntaristic, enterprising, delocalized wisdom that tries to convince us that everything is possible and that “when there’s a will, there’s a way,” regardless of the circumstances, resonate here? Jacotot rejects this explicitly and emphatically. In his modern language, the method of emancipation is certainly a “method of will,” but will is not understood here as an individual capacity of unconditioned decision and deliberate action on immanent conditionings. Rather, it is conceived as a body’s power to “act by its own movement” (Rancière 1991, 54), that is, as a certain movement of singularization. At the same time, it is a desire to relate to and communicate with others in the common power of intelligence, a wish that asserts intelligence as a shared power, which turns

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back on itself in order to communicate with others (other knowledges and languages that it ignores or barely envisages). In this same line of thought, reason must be construed not as the capacity of abstract reasoning but as a body’s power to endeavor to communicate with others, assuming the equality of intelligence and embracing the common power of intelligence (Rancière 1991, 54, 64). For this reason, what matters are the effects that assuming this common intelligence has on a body, how that knowledge of oneself as a singular appropriation—that can take different paths—affects it and leads it to explore what it does not know, to venture forth into the unforeseeable deriving from that common power. In this sense, emancipating oneself has to do with knowing “oneself to be a voyager of the mind, similar to all other voyagers: an intellectual subject participating in the power common to intellectual beings” (Rancière 1991, 33). Nevertheless, this knowledge of oneself is not the acknowledgment of a recognizable and transparent self, but rather a movement of experiencing and reexperiencing what one does, what one can do, in translations that push bodies toward the unknown, in order to explore other languages and forms of speech and perception. This capacity for openness and mobility, which is also exposure to the possible in its multiplicity of unexplored paths, knows itself subjected to conditionings and localized needs, and this contributes that “knowledge of oneself.” Moreover, this appropriated mobility must be driven by a need that tenses desire and makes it turn back on itself: There where need ceases, intelligence slumbers, unless some stronger will makes itself understood and says: continue; look at what you are doing and what you can do if you apply the same intelligence you have already made use of, by bringing to each thing the same attention, by not letting yourself stray from your path. (Rancière 1991, 51)

This need (an imperious voice that imposes unconditioned demands or difficult and challenging situations) moves intelligence and displaces bodies from that they have assumed as known and given, leading them to explore. Thus, instead of the disembodied Cartesian subject “who only knows himself by withdrawing from all the senses and from all bodies, we have a new thinking subject who is aware of himself through the action he exerts on himself as on other bodies” (Rancière 1991, 54). This capacity to explore can only be known through agency, as the mobility of a body attending to what it can do, from the specific location in which it is thrown: My hand opens, develops, extends, closes up; my fingers spread out or move together by obeying my will. In that act of touching, I know only my will to touch. That will is neither my hand, nor my brain, nor my touching. That will is me, my soul, it is my power, it is my faculty. I feel that will, it is present in me,



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it is myself; as for the manner in which I am obeyed, that I don’t feel, that I only know by its acts. (Rancière 1991, 55)

However, it seems to be that confirmation of this power for oneself can only be relational, that is, as a mobility that affirms that power both in oneself and in others. In this sense, what “the ambitious gain in the way of intellectual power by not judging themselves inferior to anyone, they lose by judging themselves superior to everyone else” (Rancière 1991, 56). Therefore, “reasonable communication is based on the equality between self-esteem and the esteem of others,” and “self-contempt is always contempt for others” (Rancière 1991, 79). The power of thought itself is what seems to be at stake for Jacotot in assuming this mobility of a body as common, in a manner that brings Spinoza to mind: The more the body is capable of being affected in many ways and of affecting other external bodies in many ways, the more the mind will be able to think (Spinoza 2006, 247). In those forms of mutual affectation, bodies divide and act against “matter’s destiny” (Rancière 1991, 80), that is, against an understanding of oneself and of the world as a given, resistant regulated, natural, uniform matter that imposes certain ways of being. Nevertheless, Jacotot’s anti-materialism or, rather, his anti-reductionist stance does not lead to the idealism of transcendence or to an unconditional, sovereign, autonomous subject. Indeed, his “anti-materialism” is quite material, because, as I have argued, it is centered on the power of bodies and what they can do, on the materiality of the incorporeal. All of this also indicates that the freedom affirmed in a movement of emancipation cannot be conceived as the unconditional or absolute freedom of individuals taking possession of themselves beyond any conditioning whatsoever (as assumed by Nordmann 2006, 124). This freedom indicates a power of mobility, of displacement, and of alteration with respect to a given position, deriving from contact with others (other subjects, experiences, forms of relation) and also affecting others. It is a mobility that starts out from the materiality of certain conditionings, which divide individuals, marking their heterogeneity and their indeterminate and incorporeal aspects. And it is also a mobility of subtle deviations that may lead to radical transformations: to the conversion of bodies from conditions that precede, mark, and affect that power, but that are also subject to transformability.

2.2. TORSION AS CONVERSION OF A BODY In any case, I have insisted that emancipation is, strictly speaking, a conversion of the body and of thought, which begins with a slight subversion of ordinary attitudes. (Rancière et al. 2009)

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  A conversion is not in the first place the illumination of a soul, but the twisting of a body called by the unknown. (Rancière 2003, 116)

Thus far in this chapter, I have been concerned with pursuing the idea of emancipation as a movement of torsion of a body, which begins with subtle subversions in everyday activities (a different relation to the movements characteristic of labor activities and to the gaze, a different use of nights, another relation to what is already known in daily activities), as well as the conditions in which this movement of torsion might emerge (the heterogeneity of practices, the disincorporating power of writing, the common power of bodies). Likewise, I have suggested some of the effects of these practices and the transformations they may bring about, such as a certain militant attitude, a desire for transformation of oneself and of the world, the affirmation of a common power, and the opening up of the field of the possible, which ­Rancière links to the desire for emancipation. Once this torsion has been identified as a sort of “conversion” of the body, we must delve into the movement of freedom it entails and its transformative effects. More specifically, it is important to consider the fact that although this freedom arises from worldly conditions, it can alter them, as well as the extent to which this movement involves the exploration of something other, something unknown that interpellates the body and leads it out of itself. I shall focus on two specific forms of conversion of a body: conversion as work on oneself, as the autopoiesis carried out by Gauny in his practicing a “cenobitic economy,” and conversion as the evental experience of an “out of place” that alters life radically, as in the case of Irene, according to Rancière’s interpretation of Rossellini’s film, Europe ’51. 2.2.1.  An Economy of Freedom In Gauny, it [the conversion] begins with the gaze of the floor layer who forgets the work of his arms and transforms his work place into a space for the exercise of a disinterested aesthetic gaze, and it continues with the elaboration of a domestic counter-economy that allows him to escape the physical and intellectual constraints of domination. (Rancière et al. 2009)

There is, consequently, continuity between the abovementioned subtle subversion in Gauny’s corporeality and the manner in which it develops and branches out into everyday vital practices that produce certain existential arrangements. That subtle subversion has made Gauny feel that his body is an assemblage of arrangements that can be readjusted through practices and reorientation. In a certain way, his cenobitic economy assumes that the body



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is constituted in its practices, habits, and gestures, which, if transformed, also transform the body: It is necessary to accustom the worker’s body to the requirements of comprehensive liberation, provide him with a means of work, food, clothing, or an inspiration fully suited to the objective of emancipating the soul. (Rancière 1983, 94)

The idea is to achieve the mobility of the soul, the difference of the body with respect to itself, which leads it to reflection on the world and on its activity, on the basis of its everyday habits and gestures. According to Gauny, in the case of a body thrown into conditions of exploitation, it is essential to find an arrangement that prevents the lacks, needs, and deprivations of this situation from hindering its capacity for adventure. Moreover, Gauny is aware of the fact that the desire for emancipation may be caught up in the cult of consumption and possession. For that reason, he considers it necessary to seek a certain precarity, which the plebeian philosopher calls “a regime of general sobriety” and conceives as an economy of both resistance and increase of those strengths captured and inhibited by greed and selfishness. Hence, one of the fundamental tenets of that economy is that “one need less is one strength more” (Gauny 1983, 99). This clearly shows that the system that depends on the productivity of bodies for the accumulation of capital requires, above all, the creation of a desire for consumption and possession of goods, thus making it more efficient, while, at the same time, depleting and exhausting the forces to challenge it. For this reason, the cenobitic economy is not conceived as a sort of austerity that reinforces the image of a moderate, docile worker who can be productive and satisfied with very little; on the contrary, as Gauny says, Austerity is of no help to the tyrant who can subject the worker to meager wages; the savings the latter must make are an intelligent and burning weapon that strikes the former in the heart. Above all, it is necessary for the producer to work when and how he wants, benefiting fully from his work, and to ­legitimately earn plenty, in order to acquire a lot of existence and freedom. (Gauny 1983, 100)

In contrast with the economy of production, saving, and consumption, the cenobitic economy is a counter-economy of freedom that saves and organizes expenditure in order to recover stolen time, develop other forces that have been inhibited by the economy of saving/consumption, and “appropriate those forces,” in order to reexperience and multiply them. As Gauny (1983) says, “Free and rich as a result of this reform, one multiplies oneself without increasing consumption, and develops oneself through the powerful exercise of organs that, no longer weighted down, obstructed, or broken by materiality,

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recover, regain their momentum [. . .] and plunge into thought” (99). This multiplication of other forces involves, for example, developing a “delicate and subtle comprehension” and the capacity to perceive curiosities of existence invisible to others (128–30). These are undetermined curiosities of existence, perceptive harmonies, impulses, and pleasures that make no sense from the perspective of an appropriating functional rationality that flattens the field of perceptual experience. In Gauny’s language, which may sound problematically dichotomous, the objective is to prevent the (rigid, heavy, compulsory) materiality of regular, urgent needs, commitments, and responsibilities (family ones, which he avoids, and job-related ones, which he always takes on “upon request” or, as we would say today, freelance) from imposing itself on the mobility of perception, of the body. This mobility is a movement of thought, which also has to do with the materiality of the world, a materiality that can be lived more fluidly: materiality in the fluidity of moving and walking; the materiality of the urban spaces one can ramble and wander through; the materiality of nature perceived at leisure in its nuances and colors; the materiality of sounds and gestures, of “intangible possessions” “of the earth and the sky” (Gauny 1983, 129). It is also the materiality of encounters and contacts one has the time to establish, and the materiality of a simple, austere cabin that the floor-layer organizes using contrasts and harmonies that he finds creative and vital. Or, to put it in Gauny’s emphatic and poetic words, it is the materiality pursued by the lover of freedom who seeks “the principle of driving forces in the vitality of things” (133). Perhaps one could say that this lover of freedom described by Gauny is sensitive to the intensive materiality of that which moves bodies, impulses, and affects. And perhaps that explains his love for the unknown (133), which is also intangible. Thus, although Gauny speaks of self-improvement and self-possession leading to greater freedom, he is not referring to the improvement and possession aimed at the self-transparency of a subject that seeks to develop and enhance capacities linked to a determined ideal imposed by a continuous task of “self-evaluation.” Neither is it a freedom that affirms autonomy and selfsufficiency with respect to others, regardless of the circumstances, and which would protect that subject from its vulnerability. It is, rather, an improvement of the capacity to explore and venture forth into the mobility of thinking, which is also mobility of the body that requires proper footwear to be able to move through the city, like a nomad (Gauny 1983, 128). Such improvement thus involves thinking more about one’s habits, about what one does and learns in the unforeseen dealings and contact that may arise during those excursions. For this reason, it is an improvement of the capacity to attend to the unknown, to that which can lead outside the self.



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Therefore, the absolute and perhaps impossible freedom sought by the cenobite is in no way a search for an immutable self, immune to the fragility of contingency; on the contrary, it is losing oneself in the contingency of everyday life: “He imagines, plans, makes suggestions to himself. He pries into every possible corner, traverses the streets, the alleys, and the crossroads. As he scrutinizes the structures of the most sumptuous neighborhoods or strays off on the loneliest circuit rounds, his gaze has the keenness of a bird of prey without food” (Rancière 2012b, 85). He can also lose himself in party nights leading nowhere, without worrying about the illusory freedom of those moments: “Although this independence has its days of orgy, it adds to the extensiveness of thinking and lavishes around its adept a fluid of dignity that compensates a hundredfold for the aberrations it must endure” (87). 2.2.2.  Out of Place As we have seen throughout this chapter, intellectual emancipation involves the exposure of a body to the unknown, which interpellates it and pushes it to an alteration of certain practices and existential arrangements. This is so, because, as stated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the activity of thinking is conceived as a task of exploration, which allows for a different relation to reality. Perhaps for this reason Rancière dedicates a book to the figure of the trip, in which he pursues this capacity of “estrangement,” of “becoming a foreigner”: The foreigner [. . .] persists in the curiosity of his gaze, displaces his angle of vision, reworks the first way of putting together words and images, undoes the certainties of place, and thereby reawakens the power present in each of us to become a foreigner on the map of places and paths generally known as reality. (Rancière 2003, 3)

This curiosity of the foreigner may be linked to something we had mentioned above: to assert the power of thought is to become aware of the fact that thought moves among arrangements of signs or, to put it in Rancière’s more contemporary terms, among montages of words and images that affect bodies and produce incorporations and meanings that become usual and fixed as the real. Nevertheless, given their heterogeneity, they are relatively unstable and can be challenged and disincorporated. In any case, the paths opened up by this exploration are countless, unexpected, and even heartbreaking. Such is the case of Irene’s trajectory in the film Europe ’51. As anyone who has seen this classic knows, the film, set in postwar Italy, narrates the story of a bourgeois mother, a foreigner to Italy, whose young

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son kills himself. According to Rancière, Rossellini, in opposition to many theories of trauma, does not show us an “irreducible real before which Irene is powerless” or “the troubles of the times and the repetition of the unspeakable” (Rancière 2003, 108). Rather than a film on trauma, it is a film on the event, which shows what it might mean to say that “something is happening,” something “intolerable” that exceeds the explainable, the “significations that are already in the wall,” and which, in its excess, can lead to “the apprenticeship of the unique power that goes forth to meet the event” (109). This acquired power manifests itself, once again, in what happens in the body, as a reflexive body that turns back on itself in its gestures, particularly in those of Irene’s face, to the point that Rancière states that the film is the story of a face, hers. From the perspective of that paralyzed face that cries, that observes, that turns around and shows surprise, it is also a film about the gaze and about representation. It is a film about the manner in which a body modifies its relation to the way in which it is represented, and assumes the gaze as a power that it refuses to represent, in a labor of reminiscence (of reflection on itself, of “recalling a thinking subject to his or her destiny”) accomplished in a threefold movement: “to know what was said, to go see somewhere else, to remember yourself” (110). Irene wants to know what was said by the child before jumping to his death. She wants to remain in the relation between saying and nothing, in the “call for the void” (Rancière 2003, 110), instead of dwelling on (psychological, sociological, or medical) explanations of what happened. She wants to confront the abyssal nature of what happened, avoiding explanations that endow it with meaning and thereby prevent it from emerging with the power of nonmeaning, of nothingness. Explanations are what Irene’s communist cousin, Andrea, provides, since he is interested in what lies behind words; “he is there to unveil” (114) and, for this reason, he does not want to know about the event; he is not concerned with what the child said; and refuses to confront the radical defect of any cause or good cause. Irene’s emancipatory movement also involves going to see somewhere else, first, in a guided tour with Andrea, who tries to bring Irene out of her individual pain. In line with his representational logic, he wants her to find the cure for her own suffering by recognizing the pain of others during a “voyage to the ‘other side’ of society” (Rancière 2003, 114), which, for Irene, is a different type of voyage, one to somewhere “whose existence she had not even imagined” (114). It is a voyage to the people, a people that is not represented and that is neither dancing, nor local color, nor a certain manner of speaking, but, as Rancière tells us, a frame in which many are enclosed and which is “a way for many to occupy a little space” (114): a space of interaction and contact in which forms of relation based on solidarity are established. But it is also a space of enclosure and immunity in which someone has to be excluded,



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like the suspicious neighbor no one wants to deal with. Thus, it is also a space that involves a contradiction between an affirmative people living in solidarity and an exclusionary, oppressive people. Breaking with representational logic, Rossellini shows us Irene’s other voyage as an encounter that puts her out of place. It is an encounter with the other, which is no longer the merely marginalized, but perhaps an unclassifiable other (such as the woman living in precarious conditions, the single mother of many children, whom she cares for easily and with contagious joy), as well as with the ambiguity of that which cannot be fixed and can always be different. According to Rancière, this is the beginning of Irene’s “madness,” which is also her conversion, not her illumination, but the torsion of her body (­Rancière 2003, 117), a turning around as a step to the side: a torsion that entails losing her way, responding to the call of the void, which has an effect but makes no sense. Here “the time to connect, explain, and heal has passed”; that which is at stake exceeds the representations of sociologists and politicians; and that which is experienced is unintelligible, since it exceeds the established categories (117), those that also gave meaning to Irene and formed her as a body. That is why her body goes mad: because it exceeds “everything that it intelligibly could be said to be one with” (118). Here, the conversion indicates a movement in which a body becomes foreign with respect to “the systems of places” (121), to that which is expected to be found as “given,” and to the manner of fixing it as a certain place. And it becomes restlessness, movement, displacement, “the action of our own reflection” (121–22). This movement has neither a place nor a defined body—we find again the movement of the incorporeal—and, in this case, Rancière links it to the “Socratic” figure of the atopos: the displaced extravagant moved by confidence (pistis), rather than by the mistrust of sages and erudites. This involves estrangement and expropriation, starting out from trust in one’s own power and in that of others and reflecting on what one does and what others do. It is the same reminiscence that means to remember oneself (123), which was central to the reflections of The Ignorant Schoolmaster. And it is also an egalitarian strangeness whose task it is to “encircles” and not to reveal, unveil or represent, a gaze that encircles and recognizes the work of singularizing oneself and others. Thus, we are led to conceive Irene’s attitude as another critical attitude (although Rancière, in order to avoid confusion, does not use the notion of critique in this text or in others, since he considers it to have been appropriated by demystifying logics and logics of inversion). This “other” critical attitude is also deployed by the artist Rossellini when he constructs the strangeness of that gaze, the conversion of a body and its voice, in its unprecedented character. In this manner, Rossellini’s way of constructing the figure of Irene creates the gaze of the foreigner and what it entails, and thus “puts us

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in touch with the truth of a world” (Rancière 2003, 125): Irene’s gaze allows her, as it did Gauny, to perceive the factory as the “site of an assault,” the site of an “assault upon the gaze” (125) and of sensory impoverishment, where bodies are dispossessed of their multiple possibilities. Specifically, the film shows that these asylum-type techniques of society— present in the rationality of the factory, the newspaper, and the asylum—are the functionalist, mechanistic, demystifying, interpretive forms of explanation “that make up the audible discourses of the social” (Rancière 2003, 126) and exclude that which has no defined or determinable place. The torsion of Irene’s body, her madness, in this case, also marks an excess with respect to these techniques, and this is why the priest, the doctor, the judge find her incomprehensible, and even intolerable. Her torsion also indicates the need to liberate the gaze, the gesture, and the power of bodies from shock and interpretation as forms of treatment and understanding. And the interval or écart, which, according to Rancière, Rossellini manages to create with his film makes it possible to see “the irremediable exactitude of the gesture” (128). Thus, fiction confronts us with “the stroke of the irremediable,” which is also “the material inscription of what has no place in the system of reality” (129): that no-place which, as we have seen, is the material inscription of the incorporeal.

2.3. EFFECTS Herein I would fain that you should learn this too, that when first—­ bodies are being carried downwards straight through the void by their own weight, at times quite undetermined and at undetermined spots they push a little from their path: and yet only just so much as you could call a change of trend. But if they were not used to swerve, all things would fall downwards through the deep void like drops of rain. —Lucretius, De rerum Natura Atoms “decline” perpetually, but their fall in this infinite clinamen allows exceptions with unforeseen consequences. An atom may diverge only slightly from its parallel trajectory, yet enough that it may collide with others, a collision from which a world may be born. Such, then, would be the essential recourse of decline: bifurcation, collision, the “ball lightning” crossing the horizon, the invention of a new form. —Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies (2009)

Intellectual emancipation is then an affective-reflective movement (reflective only insofar as it is affected by forces of transformation), through



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which a corporeality reappropriates its lived experience and its mobility, as well as its power to dis-adjust itself and reexperience positions, functions, and social meanings given to it, thus asserting their heterogeneity and their ability to unassemble and reconfigure themselves in other arrangements. We also saw that emphasizing the corporeality of this movement means highlighting an affected reflexivity, localized in certain needs and driven by the desire to explore other possibilities, a world different from that given, by reexperiencing its localization. That is why it is so important to think about what this transformative force, which is also the power of common thought, can foster, on the basis of quite diverse paths of translation and learning that are also related paths of exploration and getting lost. These paths affect one another and open up gaps-intervals with unexpected results within the boundaries of sense that fix the capacities and possibilities of bodies. From this aesthetic-cartographic approach, we could then say that a body is a heterogeneous assemblage of discourses, gestures, routines, affects, forms of rationality, and spatializations that experiences itself in its movements and forms of perception, but that can also reexperience itself by creating disjunctions and new arrangements in those assemblages. Therefore, this approach underscores the fact that no matter how subjected a corporeality may be to certain incorporated habits and routines, it can not only resist and disincorporate them but also perforate them with holes and gaps that allow for de-subjecting reconfigurations, asserting what has not taken place. Hence, the importance of the incorporeal; of those non-places that pierce the established places; of those utterances that exceed what is given as real, but which have a great power to affect bodies; of those existences unintelligible to certain rationalities, but that act as if they were; of those forces that move bodies and drive them to produce transformations though they cannot be defined or conceptualized; of that excess that occurs in the possible dis-adjustment of the assemblage; and of the interval. Hence also the emphasis on the materiality of the incorporeal and on the effects those intervals might have on the given, on bodies and their practices and modes of relation. Nevertheless, as we saw when discussing the material transformations in Gauny’s and Irene’s lives, this interval with no defined place is also quite material and has effects: deviations that modify an entire existential landscape. This is something Rancière emphasizes constantly throughout his work: the deviations of the workers examined in Proletarian Nights have the effectiveness of the clinamen, of those Brownian movements (Rancière 2012b, 31) that can unexpectedly jeopardize a whole order of sense, since “an atom may diverge only slightly from its parallel trajectory, yet enough that it may collide with others, a collision from which a world may be born”

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(Didi-Huberman 2018, location 1074). This is what Rancière gradually discovers and traces obliquely in Proletarian Nights: Why, in 1833 and 1840, did the striking tailors of Paris want their leader to be Andre Troncin, a man who divided his free time between the student cafes and his reading of the great thinkers? [. . .] Why did the battling hat makers seek out the former seminarian Philippe Monnier, whose sister went off to play the “free woman” in Egypt and whose brother-in-law would die in pursuit of his American utopia? Clearly such figures, whose sermons on worker dignity and whose evangelical devotion were studiously shunned, did not represent the ordinary round of their daily labors and angry grievances. But it is precisely because such figures were “different” that the workers would seek them out when they had something to show the bourgeois classes: proprietors, politicians, or magistrates. [. . .] If the protests of the workshop crew were to find a voice, if the emancipation of the worker was to offer a face to contemplate, if the manual laborers were to exist as subjects of a collective discourse that would give meaning to their manifold meetings and clashes, then their strange spokesmen already had to have made themselves “­different.” (Rancière 1989, ix)

The displacements produced in the divided figures of Proletarian Nights, through their contact with other experiences (of writing, reading, and relating to others), allow them to question their identity, their capacities, the use of their time and space, and the visibility of their voice as significant speech. And this interrogation may also lead to questioning their right to speak, their right to not always have to be represented by others. This is why proletarian emancipation depends less on the discovery of the conditions of exploitation than on the workers’ possibility of acquiring a different knowledge and experience of themselves, through the types of corporeal explorations we have described here and which allow them to challenge the hierarchies underlying their exploitation. And, as the above quote underscores, it is precisely in those experiences of de-identification with respect to an assigned proletarian identity that “the voice of the great collectivity of workers” may arise, or, in the words of the later Rancière, a political subjectivization that asserts the name of “proletarian” in a special way. Like the movements of alteration that have made it possible, this collective voice manifests itself from a certain position of indeterminacy, since, according to Rancière, the proletarian begins to emerge here not as a defined class but as the class of all those relegated to the margins and who refuse to be integrated in a certain manner. Proletarians begin to affirm themselves as a class that declassifies, as part of those who have no part. Thus appears Rancière’s interest in thinking, in contrast with Jacotot,10 the possibility of forms of political emancipation (which he will do in later



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works), although his formulations to not delve into the ways in which these paths of individual and collective transformation cross, affect, and potentiate one another. Moreover, emphasizing this crossing of boundaries that gives rise to the interval and its effectiveness makes it possible to take up another point of special interest for our inquiry, namely, the types of ruptures and de-subjections that can occur in bodies when they emancipate themselves. To put it more exactly, one could say that in his reflections on intellectual emancipation, Rancière makes it possible to think of a particular movement of de-subjection that cannot be defined merely as resistance, transgression, or parodic reiteration. Let us return to the figure of Gauny: the manner in which his body de-subjects itself from a series of dominations (identifications, constrictions, regulations imposed by certain boundaries of sense and perception) is a movement that can be described as a subtle subversion and, therefore, as a certain surpassing given boundaries. But it is more than that. Of course this movement subtly subverts certain (normative) limits, codes imposed on a body, but precisely in order to create an interval among them, in which a body reconfigures itself rather than undoing or losing itself as a certain type of subject. Thus, the limit is neither denied (as in merely negative resistance) nor radicalized, as in the most interesting movement of transgression: the movement in which the limit is radicalized to the point of its limits, in which it may disappear (see Foucault 1977, 34), and, with it, the subject produced by delimitation. In fact, Gauny does not take up the criteria of a dominant code of conduct (e.g., capitalist productivity, with its penchant for performance and efficiency) in order to radicalize them, turn them around, and transgress them by transvaluating them. More than radicalizing, Gauny detains, suspends the urge for goal-driven productivity; he separates the activity from the object, in order to retain only the experience of movement of productive activity. What we observed follows from this detention in the cadence of the effort and gestuality of the body and its reconfigurations in another type of affective economy and existence. For this very reason, the de-subjection and reconfiguration produced in Gauny’s movements cannot be seen as the altered (mimetic, parodic, decontextualized) reiteration of codes and acquired routines. Here, routines are not reiterated, but rather disassembled, torsioned, altered through suspension, thus giving rise to a discordance among the elements of routine activity: a lack of concordance between gaze and hands, between activity and expected object, and between maximum effort and functional productivity, which can lead to the new arrangements of the cenobitic economy. But why should we be interested in returning to figures from other times (Gauny, the proletarians of 1830, Jacotot, Irene) and to the reflections on

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corporeality that they might trigger? To what extent are they reflections inspired by bodies facing forms of subjection (that in Foucault’s terms could be described as disciplinary and controlling) that are very different from those we face now in times of a fluid post-Fordist capital with a great power of delocalization? Rancière allows us to provide a possible answer to these questions: The return of savage capitalism and the old assistance to the “excluded” once again places on the agenda the efforts of those committed to breaking up that circle, their experience of the division of time and thought. But, also, in view of the nihilism of official wisdom, it is necessary to re-educate ourselves in the more subtle wisdom of those whose occupation was not thought, but who nevertheless, by disrupting the cycle of day and night, have taught us to question once again the evidence of the relations between words and things, the before and the after, the possible and the impossible, consent and refusal. (Rancière and Colectivo situaciones 2010, 25)

The “nihilism of official wisdom” refers to the currently prevailing consensual logic, according to which social reality is what it is, a space that can be objectivized on the basis of quantifiable conditionings that simply have to do with market operations and with the dynamics of what “progress” requires, or, more generally, with “social integration.” As Rancière says, at stake in this logic is the “monopoly of the forms of describing the perceptible, the thinkable, and the doable” (Rancière 2011c, 6). This means the fixation of what is presumably given to us as real and necessary, of the boundaries between the possible and the unfeasible, between capacities and incapacities, between expert knowledge and ignorance, between that which is marginalized and that which should be included on the basis of social integration programs. It is, therefore, also a logic of inclusion-exclusion that brings about distrust and dispossession of the common power we have referred to here: a power that was inscribed in social rights, thanks to the social struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, in diverse places, this power is being denied and those rights are being dismantled by the regulatory “objectivity” of the market and its renewed savage capitalism. In view of this distrust and dispossession of the common power, of this nihilism that, according to Rancière, can also, for different reasons, beset certain currents of critical theory, the idea is to “keep a space open for thinking—which also means a space for affective11 power, for desirability— about all that I’ve understood by the noun, emancipation” (Rancière 2016c, ­155–56). I expect to have shown that the emancipatory practices of bodies, those displayed, for instance, in the subtle corporeal knowledge of Gauny and his accomplices also have to do with keeping open the affective power, the desirability of emancipation, in order to confront the distrust of anyone’s



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power and the prevailing forms of dispossession of bodies. In times of neoliberal consensualism, this is even more necessary. The following chapters will be dedicated to an in-depth reflection on to what extent what I have called consensualism can produce such forms of dispossession of bodies (chapter 3), and how the latter may be challenged by forms of collective emancipation that lead to reinventions of the common (chapters 4 and 5). If I dwell on the forms of inequality before returning to the question of collective claims for equality, it is not because I agree “with those who say that first you have to study the specific historical form of inequality, and so understand the logic of the system, before you can develop strategies that are a match for it” (Rancière 2016c, 1120). I start by acknowledging that egalitarian manifestations occur and that it is not the intellectual who must indicate how they can and should happen, by first clarifying how forms of subjection work. However, these emancipatory manifestations that have already occured and continued to do so struggle against specific forms of domination, and they are produced by creating intervals among those forms. Therefore, “the construction of scenes of equality is dependent on what existing forms of inequality bring to it” (Rancière 2016c, 112). Since what matters is to pursue those scenes and embrace their dissensual force, it is first necessary to reflect on the forms of domination they are struggling against.12 Hence the order of the moments discussed in what follows.

NOTES  * A shorter, more limited version of this chapter appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism (Quintana 2019). Here it is used by permission of Sage Publications.  1. I refer specifically to three of the above-cited books, since The Ignorant Schoolmaster has received plenty of attention, particularly in studies on theories of education (see Bingham and Biesta 2010; Biesta 2011), as well as from a greater audience (Rancière 2016d, 102).   2.  Other arguments to discuss (2) can be found in chapters 4 and 5. Particularly in the latter, I will challenge Myers’ arguments and Hallward’s position.   3.  This turning back on itself of the movement of a body could be linked to the experience of a lived body, without necessarily leading to an experiential, embodied understanding of corporeality along the lines of Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology and its resonances in the current understanding of embodiment. This last matter is not really in play here because, on the one hand, Rancière’s approach is clearly not phenomenological, and, on the other, the objective of his aesthetic cartography is to reflect on moments of incorporeal corporeality and moments in which lived experience is disrupted, moments of non-embodiment, to put it briefly.

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  4.  As I just suggested, this incorporeal materiality that I shall pursue here could be related to the incorporeal as described by Elizabeth Grosz (2017) in her most recent book. However, Rancière’s approach is aesthetic-cartographic and not ontological (like that of Grosz).   5.  In a very oblique way, this passage from Gauny reminds me of Fanon (1952) when he says that the suffering of the black body has to do, above all, with the way in which it is denied and thus loses all connection with its facticity, with its “lived experience,” so that, in the midst of dominations, it feels its body merely as reified, objectified, in the third person (Fanon 1952; Noland 2009, 203).   6.  The English translator uses “time shot” (Rancière 1989, vii), but I prefer to maintain the French “volé,” or stolen.   7.  Rancière points out that although Gauny’s reflections on the prison tend to call to mind Foucault’s later analyses of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish, the difference is that in Gauny, the contrast established by Foucault between torment and surveillance is absent. According to Gauny, the torment of the body continues in these prisons, precisely in the forms of surveillance (Rancière 1983a, 16).   8.  Although what is at stake here is not the evental as in Badiou, Rancière does allow for a certain comprehension of the event “as a relationship between two possible worlds” (Rancière 2016d, 110).   9.  See Bourdieu (2003, 205–6) and Nordmann (2006, 68). 10.  For whom, as reiterated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, collective emancipation makes no sense. 11.  I have corrected the translation, which says “effective.” Rancière speaks of puissance affective. 12.  As is well known, Rancière, unlike Foucault, speaks of forms of domination and not of power, when referring to the subjection practices that currently enclose the field of experience of subjects. Moreover, he insists that the effect of those practices of domination is, above all, the production of forms of inequality. However, it is important to bear in mind that when Rancière speaks of domination, he does not use the term in the same way Foucault does to refer to forms of coercion that saturate the field of experience and completely impede the mobility of subjects. On the contrary, as we can infer from this chapter, for Rancière it is a matter of heterogeneous distributions of sense that become irreversible fractures amidst fixations and relations of inequality.

Chapter 3

Consensualism and the Dispossession of Bodies

In what sense could we say that the contemporary world is dominated by a consensual logic? And to what extent is the dispossession of bodies its main effect? By posing these questions at this point of the book, I aim to put ­Rancière’s formulations into dialogue with other diagnoses of our times, particularly those focused on neoliberal discourse, as the key to thinking about the current situation. Although Rancière does not use the category of “neoliberalism” that is so widespread today in the social sciences, framing his reflections in some of the most influential discussions on the matter makes it possible to understand better the pertinence of the notion of consensus when reflecting on the present and to appreciate the singularity of Rancière’s interpretation of our times. In establishing that dialogue, I also expect to question our current situation, the manner in which formulations produced elsewhere, for example in Europe and the United States, might resonate with experiences produced here and now in Colombia’s complex circumstances. The following questions arise: What makes it possible to think the idea of consensus and to what extent might we relate it to current reflections on the forms of dispossession of contemporary capitalism, linked to some analyses of neoliberalism? Why insist on the notion of dispossession, particularly as dispossession of bodies? What is at stake in this insistence and how does it interpellate us here and now, in the complex circumstances I am writing in? To begin with, I shall provide some elements that will allow us to advance with respect to the last two questions, and then go on to address the current discussion regarding forms of dispossession in the context of the debate on neoliberalism.

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The following accounts of experiences in Colombia can shed some light on the issue of dispossession: For the neoliberal movement, territories are not for the people, territories are valued according to economic interests, if there are minerals in the territory, since for those persons the territory is important only in terms of their logic of accumulation. They don’t really care about the territory; if after ten years they have gotten all their economic benefits, they leave and never go back there. For us, it’s a question of life, because we do have all our life planned, that of our children and their offspring, as long as the sun keeps rising, as long as the earth exists. That’s the difference and that’s the importance, and that’s why we defend our territory so strongly, because for us, the territory is life, not just material life [. . .]; for us, territory also means spirituality. (Representative of the movement Coordinador Nacional Agrario, CNA) We are also against the current, neoliberal extractivist models, and what we are struggling for is the construction of new imaginaries of and for a dignified life. (Young representative of the youth network, Tejuntas) Because now, with neoliberalism, it seems that we don’t fight for work, we just look for it ourselves in the cities, so work is not a right, but more like a reward, isn’t it? If we have money to buy food, it’s because we are good workers and try hard, and if we don’t it’s because we are lazy dead-beats, right? (Female leader of Tejuntas) The thing is that what neoliberalism produces in people’s bodies is the idea that you are totally responsible for what happens to your body and this erases all responsibility of the State, of private enterprise, of public institutions, of public policies and how they are formulated. That is like our starting point and what we want to do is question that place assigned to us as responsible for our own bodies and our health [as thin, successful bodies]. (Female leader of the feminist collective Gordas sin chaqueta)

These testimonies were gathered during a 2015 event in which around fifteen leaders and representatives of very diverse popular movements participated (peasant, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant, urban, youth, and feminist movements; animal rights activists; representatives of persons with disabilities; and advocates of open use of digital environments). The event we organized,1 “Forms of political action of popular movements: Toward a glossary of the common,” started out by challenging those divisive distributions that fix a politics of identity, in order to reformulate the question of the common, which might bring together such diverse collectives. The discourse of neoliberalism proved to be a constant in all of the interventions. Despite their differential aspects and effects, they all converged in one key problem: the dispossession of territories as vital, affective spaces of relations not only among human beings but also “with other living beings, with beings from the past and the future” (Aparicio et al. 2017), as well as with a spiritual



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dimension that links the human to the nonhuman, the organic to the inorganic, through practices that make up the web of everyday life. People are dispossessed of their land to give way to economic projects that reduce territories to spaces of intervention and large-scale economic exploitation, planned hierarchically from above and with devastating effects for both the environment and human health. It is, thus, the dispossession of “good living,” with everything this concept entails: not just minimum living conditions (access to health, education, food safety, protection from insult and violence, freedom of movement) but also the possibility of deciding how to organize these conditions in solidarity-based economies, with greater self-government and local participation, that is, economies aimed at fostering more equitable forms of production in harmony with nature, beyond merely extractive uses of natural resources. It is dispossession of the common power to decide on the use of territories, carried out by state interventions linked to big capital, which have already decided beforehand on the economic use of those lands, as well as dispossession of collective forms of association in the name of an individual considered to be responsible for his possibilities of subsistence and flourishing. And it is dispossession of the possibilities of singularization of bodies in the name of their “responsibility” to appear as “normal,” thin, self-controlled, “successful” bodies. However, speaking of “dispossession” does not mean thinking of a merely negative logic of capture or extraction of capacities and rights, and even less of alienation of a given essence (cf. Dardot and Laval 2014, 135), since we cannot ignore that the currently operating forms of domination and power are productive, which means they generate experiences, forms of being with one another, and forms of subjectivity. Furthermore, the aesthetic-cartographic approach adopted in this book opposes any type of essentializing, especially any tying the human to a given distribution of sense. Nonetheless, I believe that the idea of dispossession does highlight the fact that the effects of these productive forms of subjection or subordination are to depotentiate, depoliticize, close off, and flatten possibilities of agency, thus making it possible to grasp the effects of those practices on the political dimension. In this sense, the discussion of the issue of dispossession presented here and its relation to Rancière’s reflections necessarily broadens the scope of the notion, when compared to analyses such as Harvey’s (2003, 2005) and to those that insist on the “new enclosures” produced by contemporary capitalism (Midnight Notes 2001; Bollier 2003; Boyle 2003). However, I do take these analyses into account in order to relate them to other aspects and thus propose a richer, more complex notion of “dispossession.” On the basis of what we have said, it is possible to infer that the dispossession of the commonality of territories, of their common uses, of common

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goods,2 and, above all, of the collective practices that allow the latter to appear presupposes a privatization of the world that is exhausting the planet and its ecological systems. This exhaustion also brings about the dispossession and exhaustion of bodies due to the demand for productivity imposed on the entrepreneurial subject. In the words of the Midnight Notes collective, “[today] a tired earthly commons [. . .] meets tired human bodies” (Midnight Notes 2001, 6). Thus, at the crossroads of different legacies, transmitted in discontinuous and differentiated ways (from Marx, Latin American theories of dependence, peasant, Afro-descendant, and indigenous struggles, and decolonial and feminist approaches), the above-cited testimonies show that dispossession, in a very broad sense, is dispossession of a common power, which, as Butler and Athanasiou (2013, 3ff.) have argued, is displayed in the exposure of subjects to their interdependence and vulnerability. The dispossession of that common power, then, could be interpreted as the inhibition of the radical vulnerability inherent to life, as always dependent, as never self-sufficient, as never in full possession of itself. It is a vulnerability experienced in common, which can also give rise to different forms of collective agency, and it is a dispossession of the possibility of bodies to grant themselves other forms of common life. Several of the voices mentioned above understand that effect of dispossession as the result of a type of regulation of practices, which they all call “neoliberalism.” Therefore, before going on to explain how Rancière’s formulations on consensualism can contribute to these reflections, I shall discuss some influential understandings of neoliberalism and the manner in which they allow for an analysis of dispossession. 3.1.  NEOLIBERALISM, DISPOSSESSION, AND DEPOLITICIZATION The meaning of the term “neoliberalism” has given rise to multiple discussions, many of which have insisted that it cannot be conceived as something monolithic and stable, but rather as a process that materializes in different ways, depending on local historical contexts (Peck and Tickell 2002), or, in Stuart Hall’s words, as a “field of oscillations” (cf. Brown 2015, 48). But it could also be considered a global project (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010) that can be studied on the basis of the similar patterns it reproduces in diverse experiences and spaces, among which correlations and convergences can occur (see Escobar 2001; Brand and Wissen 2005; Springer 2008, 2011). Taking the latter orientation into account, it is possible to identify in the existing literature, as Springer (2012) points out following Ward and England (2007), four fundamental uses of the



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discourses on neoliberalism, among which there may be connections and dissonances: 1. “Neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideological project” (Springer 2012, 136) capable of affecting the life of other social sectors through interpretations, worldviews, and public policies that become hegemonic, that is, socially accepted by the dominant common sense, despite the fact that they end up benefiting only an elite that consolidates or builds up its power through them (Duménil and Lévy 2004, Harvey 2005; Springer 2012, 136). 2. “Neoliberalism as a program and a public policy” (Springer 2012, 136) that has mainly operated through forms of privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and monetarism, with depoliticizing and growing inequality as its effects (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Springer 2012, 136). 3. Neoliberalism as a form of State (Springer 2012, 137), centered on order, discipline, immigration issues, and police-type public policies (Peck and Tickell 2002), increasingly linked to the power of economic groups and corporate interests, which end up influencing government practices (Wolin 2010). 4. Neoliberalism as a form of governmentality (Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996; Lemke 2002; Brown 2003, 2006, 2015; Foucault 2004 [1978–1979]; Springer 2012, 137; Dardot and Laval 2014), that is, “as a specific form of normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance practices, and citizenship,” which, as a political rationality, “governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains” (Brown 2006, 693). Undoubtedly, the Marxist (1) and Foucauldian (4) understandings have been the most influential in current political theory debates, and their assumptions can also account for interpretations (2) and (3). Let us think specifically of the work on this subject carried out by David Harvey (2003, 2005) and Wendy Brown (2003, 2006, 2015). Despite their differences, these two perspectives converge in considering that neoliberal discourse and the practices it generates, as a form of state, produce public policy programs characterized by the “conversion of every human need or desire into a profitable enterprise” (Brown 2015, 28); or, in Harvey’s terms (2005), by the commodification of every aspect of life (165ff.). Likewise, these two approaches grant significant importance to the state and underscore that, in its concrete practices, neoliberalism requires not a reduction of state intervention (as might be inferred from the formulations of certain theorists considered to be neoliberal, such as Hayek in The Road to Serfdom) but, rather, a reconfiguration of the state as the necessary agent for the implementation of its public policies (Harvey 2005, 64–86; Brown 2006, 694ff.). Moreover, these two approaches agree

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that neoliberalism leads to the depoliticization and loss of critical capacity of the ideologically managed or governed subjects. I shall now dwell on some of these aspects, highlighting the differences among these influential approaches and paying special attention to this last consideration, which is of special interest for this book. 3.1.1. Neoliberalism as Ideology and Dispossession by Accumulation According to David Harvey’s version of the history of neoliberalism, capitalist elites interpreted the neoliberal turn begun by Thatcher and Reagan, with their economic policies aimed at deregulation3 and privatization, as a reaction to the accumulation crisis of the 1960s and to the threat of social discontent that stagflation might trigger. Particularly, it would have been a reaction whose objective was, from the very beginning, “to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (Harvey 2005, 19) or to create them, like in Russia or China, although another effect of this process has also been reconfiguration of existing classes (e.g., with the consolidation of an elite in the financial sector) and the emergence of new processes of class formation in other sectors (such as biotechnology and information technologies) (Harvey 2005, 34). As Dardot and Laval (2014, 13–14) have pointed out, Harvey’s form of explanation presupposes a quite intentional, subjective understanding of forms of power: “as if the emergence of a new social form was to be attributed to the consciousness of one or more strategists as regards its source or real centre; and as if recourse to the intentionality of a subject were the ultimate principle of any historical intelligibility” (Dardot and Laval 2014, 13). The problem with said explanation is that, contrary to Marx, it takes “the historical results of a process for goals consciously decided on at the outset” (13). And then, continuing with Marx’s analyses of “capital’s eternal tendency to valorize itself through the expansion of the commodity form,” he ends up concluding once again that “the real motor of history remains the power of capital, which subordinates state and society to itself by enrolling them in the service of its blind accumulation” (14). Moreover, an explanation in these reductive terms can lead to a merely economistic reading of neoliberalism and lose sight of the fact that it can also be thought as historical process that affects every aspect of social life, as Harvey himself points out in different parts of A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Now then, given that the foreseeable conclusion of this study is that neoliberalism has only produced a redistribution of wealth from the bottom up, that is, increased inequality,4 which has entailed the enrichment of global economic elites at the expense of the impoverishment of ordinary citizens,



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Harvey necessarily has to ask himself why this elite project became hegemonic and how it became socially accepted by most people (Harvey 2005, 38). Of course, in many parts of the world, such as Chile and Argentina,5 and, we could say, also in Colombia6 and other parts of the “periphery,” it was imposed though repressive mechanisms and types of violence aimed at destroying bonds of solidarity and forms of mobilization, as well as at “criminalizing whole communities of impoverished and marginalized populations” (Harvey 2005, 48). Harvey’s arguments regarding the shaping of this commonsense point in different directions. The most relevant for our inquiry are the following: on the one hand, the author resorts to the Marxist logic of ideology when arguing that the neoliberal project mobilized established prejudices and appreciations, particularly in “the center of economic development,” in order to mask economic interests and social realities. In the specific case of the United States, this can be observed in the functionalization of the American ideal of individual freedom to assert regressive forms of privatization and fiscal policies that, in the name of nonintervention, generated other forms of regulation and state intervention in the lives of persons (such as work flexibilization and decrease of salaries), aimed at building “appropriate infrastructures for business,” that is, for “corporate welfare” (Harvey 2005, 47). Thus, ideological manipulation caused people to vote “uncritically” in favor of projects that, in Harvey’s Marxist terms, go against their economic and class interests (cf. Harvey 2005, 50). According to Harvey, such ideological manipulation entails the “construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture” based on “individual libertarianism” (which the author sees as exploding in the 1968 movements) (Harvey 2005, 42), as well as on other “misleading,” even antagonistic appreciations (Harvey 2005, 39). On the one hand we have the “cultural impulse called ‘post-modernism’ ” (42), focused on “the narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity” (47), aimed at promoting desires of exploration, change, novelty, and consumption, and, ultimately, at having the working class identify with the bourgeois way of life, private property, and individualist existence. On the other, we find traditional values that, in the name of race, ways of understanding religion, and cultural belonging (in nationalist terms, often homophobic and anti-feminist as well), blame social problems on progressive, liberal interventions that had used excessive state power in order to integrate minority groups (blacks, women, environmentalists) (Harvey 2005, 50). These arguments resonate with elements I have been underscoring thus far in this book. However, the logic of ideology (of masking/unmasking) and of narcissistic individualization they appeal to, which are frequent in Marxist and post-Marxist discourses when accounting for the loss of critical agency of dominated subjects, involves some not very

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emancipatory assumptions that deserve to be critically discussed (I shall return to this later on). For now, I would like to delve into one of Harvey’s more interesting arguments, used to explain the neoliberal, hegemonic common sense: the manner in which neoliberalism has given rise to a form of state that is required in order for its economic-political interventions to operate. The dismantling of the welfare state through the privatization of public services (health, education, road infrastructure), the emphasis on “creating a favorable business climate to induce a string inflow of foreign investment” (Harvey 2005, 23) (together with work flexibilization measures), and public policies of personal responsibility (according to which social obligations are regulated as personal obligations), among others, directly affect the life of people, enclosing them within certain life possibilities that become the only eligible ones. This undoubtedly creates a contradiction between the idea of “freedom of choice,” so emphasized in the neoliberal creed, and people’s alleged incapacity to choose forms of life that exceed that model, and which are therefore marginalized, devalued, or even destroyed. Moreover, this argument has a lot to do with the way Harvey explains the current dispossession by accumulation in contemporary capitalism, and it situates and provides specificity to his analysis. In fact, his characterization of this dispossession and its effects, based on his formulations on the neoliberal state, can resonate with Foucauldian analyses such as Brown’s, with post-humanist perspectives like Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2011), and with some of Rancière’s ideas, although his theoretical standpoints and the manner in which he accounts for these aspects conceptually, politically, and historically are quite different. As a matter of fact, Harvey’s emphasis on the role of the state underscores how the latter’s monopoly of violence and its definitions of legality (Harvey 2005, 160) play a crucial role in backing and promoting the effectiveness of neoliberal interventions. This clear intervention is illustrated by the state’s functioning according to a credit system coordinated and practically dictated by IMF policies (Harvey 2005, 164), which may lead to land expropriation for purposes of intensive production, in order to comply with the acquired debts. In the words of the Midnight Notes collective (2001), in the spirit of Harvey’s analyses: “Just as the Tudor court sold off huge tracts of monastery and communal land to their creditors, so too modern African and Asian governments agree to capitalize and ‘rationalize’ agricultural land in order to satisfy IMF auditors who will only ‘forgive’ foreign loans under those conditions” (5). This rationalization destroys traditional subsistence practices in order to give rise to intensive forms of agricultural production or mining, or, in general, to the private appropriation of spaces, natural resources, forms of production of knowledge, and to the expropriation of the means of survival of persons who are pushed to “proletarianization” (Álvarez and Grigera 2013,



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89) or, rather, to “precarization,” to becoming underpaid, easily replaceable “disposable” workers (Harvey 2005, 169), with few social guarantees. As Kevin Bales ([2000] 2012) has pointed out, all of this can lead to new forms of enslavement since in “the new world [in which] capital flies wherever labor is cheapest” (232), that is, precisely to the poorest countries, those with the least social protection and the cheapest labor, new forms of forced labor may arise, which, through their irregular operation, produce great profits at very little cost for transnational companies. It is perhaps due to the establishment of these forms of precarization that Rancière suggests that our world is experiencing the return of certain forms of savage capitalism, similar to those Gauny had to face at the end of the nineteenth century. Without assuming a global narrative of capitalism or ignoring the singularity of current forms of social regulation, we are once again seeing “the violent appropriation of labor and the wearing out of laboring and non-laboring bodies” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 11), albeit through other mechanisms and according to other logics or forms of rationality, such as contemporary capitalism’s process of financialization.7 Such is the case of indebted countries, which obeying the mandate of financial institutions (such as the World Bank or the IMF), adopt austerity measures that entail, first, cutbacks on public expenditure as a condition for granting loans, and, second, the forms of job precarization resulting from those cutbacks. But the reduction of social rights presupposes the “suppression of rights to the commons” (Harvey 2005, 159), that is, of rights regarding a common that is not conceived as capable of being appropriated by any particular party (Balibar 1994, 219). Together with this comes the reduction of common spaces and forms of use and relation, or, in Rancière’s terms (2016c), the reduction of “all that once existed as a common fabric of solidarity: the fact that the poor could go to the same hospitals as the rich, that there was equality in living standards when it came to education, healthcare, public transport, etc.” (157).8 Only the neoliberal intervention programs promoted by the state and imposed on indebted countries by the World Bank or the IMF are now considered to be of common interest. Any different program (e.g., alternative forms of production and consumption, such as indigenous or peasant agricultures and artisanal fishing and mining), any project that might seem to exceed the program established for “general prosperity” is integrated as a minority project that is gradually adaptable to prevailing public policies. If, however, it proves to resist that, it is marginalized or condemned to failure, and if its resistance is very strong, it is repressed by police forces, often in association with para-state forces (Harvey 2005, 70–71). In agreement with these considerations and mobilizing some Foucauldian tools, Povinelli affirms that the neoliberal state—which, in Foucault’s terms is biopolitically oriented to faire vivre in a certain way and to laisser mourir,

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by abandoning and marginalizing—“resuscitates faire mourir into its topology” (Povinelli 2011, 22). This is so, because “any form of life that could not produce values according to market logic would not merely be allowed to die, but, in situations in which the security of the market [. . .] seemed at stake, ferreted out and strangled,” as a controlled risk (22). The fact that forms of life not organized according to market values are seen as a “potential security risk” (Povinelli 2011, 22) for “environments favorable to foreign investment,” for example, points to a specificity of neoliberal rationality that the abovementioned authors interpret differently. For Harvey, what is at stake is the commodification of everything, including the state; for Brown and Povinelli, it is rather the dissemination of “the model of the market to all domains and activities” (Brown 2015, 31), even when money is not directly the issue, by conceiving people as actors who plan their lives according to a strategic investment-yield rationality, aimed at increasing the future value of subjects and not an immediate monetary profit (Brown 2015, 34). According to Dardot and Laval, the specificity of neoliberal rationality is the fact that the market is construed “as a process of self-formation of the economic subject, as a self-educating, self-disciplining subjective process whereby individuals learn to conduct themselves” (Dardot and Laval 2014, 123), and as a process that seeks to be ever more inclusive.9 What I am interested in underscoring at the moment is that another effect of the prevailing commercial-entrepreneurial logic, with its processes of self-formation, is the emergence of available, disposable (Harvey 2005, 169) workers as well as of zones of abandonment that make it possible to observe how “the burden of care” shifted “from state institutions to the family and communities” (Biehl 2005, 48), and to the subjects made self-responsible in them. Thus, the projects for another type of life lead to exhaustion (Povinelli 2011, 5–9). This happens through government regulation plans, whose humanitarian logics of victimization, social reintegration, and self-­ responsibility depotentiate and dispossess subjects of the possibilities of resisting or enduring (as Povinelli 2011 says), although never completely. 3.1.2. Neoliberalism as a Form of Rationality and Its Effects on Dedemocratization In one of her most recent books, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015), Wendy Brown gathers and develops previous works (cf. Brown 2003, 2006, 2011), in order to elaborate on “the grammar and terms” of neoliberalism as a form of rationality, the “mechanisms of its dissemination” (Brown 2015, 201), the conditions of its interpellative power, and its dedemocratizing effects. Although Brown’s reflections focus mainly on Europe and the United States, they can contribute elements (some of them



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questionable and problematic) to discuss the effects of dispossession that neoliberalism has had in other parts of the world, with differentiable aspects. Brown agrees with Foucault that “the distinctiveness of neoliberalism” is the “economization of the entire social field” (Foucault 2004, 241–43; Brown 2015, 61), particularly the extension of the market model to all activities of life, as suggested above (Brown 2015, 22). According to Brown’s analyses and beyond what Foucault could have foreseen, economization today involves three fundamental aspects: (1) subjects are always conceived as homo oeconomicus; (2) the latter is no longer conceived merely as an entrepreneurial-­predictive subject, but as human capital that seeks to strengthen its competitive position; and (3) the sphere of activity of that human capital is “increasingly that of financial or investment capital” (Brown 2015, 33). Thus, current financialization features a new model of cross-cutting conduct: the state as enterprise, subjects as members of a firm, and subjects themselves as firms, which leads Brown to suggest that, to a certain extent, neoliberalism has returned to Plato’s homology between city and soul, in the form of an analogous organization of states and subjects.10 In both cases, an entrepreneurial rationality leads to conceiving both state and subject as management projects aimed at the accumulation of capital (Brown 2015, 22). Today, this convergence of levels can be observed in the field of education, targeted at the formation of productive human capital, according to established competences and rankings, as well as in government discourses that emphasize the state’s task is to increase its competitiveness, in such a way that in the world of financialization, all of the commitments of the democratic liberal state are thought in terms of metrics aimed at boosting their investment value (Brown 2015, 35, 78). In this sense, the most remarkable effect of such economization is, according to Brown, that democratic values are reread in economic terms: the ideas of autonomy and participation of the people are replaced by the ideas of unequal free competition governed by an instrumental rationality that limits choices, while equality before the law and the idea of popular sovereignty are replaced with “a market formulation of winners and losers,” through legal mechanisms that legitimize neoliberal interventions and consolidate their dissemination (Brown 2015, 41, 152ff.). Brown is interested in tracing this economization of life and the manner in which it is “eviscerating the democratic imaginary of European modernity” (Brown 2015, 28), an imaginary that is also contradictory and problematic, but which would have been essential for the deployment of a critical agency anchored in the “democratic values” of freedom and equality (Brown 2015, 153). Before returning to this last point, which is clearly of interest for this book, a brief digression is warranted to add other elements to the discussion of this issue. According to Brown, conceiving neoliberalism as a form of rationality

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makes it possible to trace its implications and dedemocratizing effects, in contrast with other analyses, such as Harvey’s and Foucault’s. However, this formulation is somewhat paradoxical: On the one hand, Brown distances herself from Harvey by resorting to Foucauldian tools: particularly, by understanding neoliberalism as a “normative order of reason” (Brown 2015, 117), she aims to show that it is not a process planned from the top down, as Harvey thinks. On the contrary, it is a form of rationality that “governs” and “measures” all spheres of life, circulating in all directions and establishing an “order of truth” (the market as the locus of truth-telling), which regulates the conduct of the different subjects (cf. Brown 2015, 118). For this reason, as Foucault repeatedly pointed out, it is not a question here of ideological mechanisms promoted by a dominant elite in order to manipulate the dominated ones. It is rather a form of rationality through which subjects in general, the state, society, and their relations, tend to be “ubiquitously governed” (cf. Brown 2015, 117). This dissemination of neoliberalism to all spheres would account for the interpellative power and the consensus produced by this rationality and for the manner in which it brings about a threatening dedemocratization. But, on the other hand, using those Foucauldian tools, Brown draws conclusions that are far from Foucault’s fields of interest and formulations. As the author recognizes (Brown 2015, 74), Foucault was not interested in thinking the possible effects of neoliberal rationality on the liberal democratic imaginary and principles. This would not only be due to Foucault’s alleged “indifference” to democracy (Brown 2015, 77) but also due to his lack of attention to capital. More precisely, according to Brown, Marx’s reflections make it possible to dwell on something that escaped Foucault and which would be crucial to recognizing the dedemocratizing effect of neoliberalism: the fact that capitalism functions as a social and historical force that cannot be thought merely as a regime of truth (Brown 2015, 75). It is important to recognize capitalism as a regime that circulates certain truths in order to “sustain its legitimacy as power,” and, more concretely, “the imperatives that issue from the systemic drives of capitalism—the imperative of cheapening labor and expanding markets, the imperative of economic growth, the imperative of constant renovations in production (and now in financial instruments) to generate profit, and so forth” (Brown 2015, 75). Thus, although Brown insists that she is not thinking of a unitary logic of capitalism, or losing sight of the different forms it can adopt, of the different types of capital, or of the fact that its imperatives always operate discursively, she does emphasize that capitalism, in its diverse formulations and reorganizations, is a historical force that operates with the same impulses and that these tend to accumulation by dispossession (though she does not say this explicitly). Moreover, Brown turns to Marx’s reflections in the German Ideology to affirm that “capital [. . .] dominates the human beings and human worlds it organizes” (Brown 2015,



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76; my emphasis). In her view, emphasizing this makes it possible to see, in all of its implications, that neoliberalism and its forms of freedom not only conduct bodies (as might be inferred from a Foucauldian point of view), but that “what is being named as freedom elides and even discursively inverts crucial powers of domination” (77–78; my emphasis). In other words, as Harvey pointed out, it produces ideology. Thus, by combining Foucault’s analyses with quite anti-Foucauldian Marxist approaches, Brown arrives at a conception of neoliberalism as a new form of accumulation, imposed through ideological mechanisms of domination and not merely through forms of power,11 which brings her reflections once again close to those of Harvey. Beyond highlighting these methodological tensions in Brown’s research, it is interesting to examine where they lead and, more exactly, how they relate to the purpose of her book and her proposals for critical analysis. First of all, my impression is that Brown’s diagnosis of dedemocratization entails seeing neoliberalism as a form of rationality that saturates the field of experience. For that reason, she stretches Foucauldian terminology a bit in order to suggest a distinction between “form of rationality” and “discourse,” which emphasizes the totalizing effects the former might have on the latter: No discourse governs society as a whole, and it is also not quite right to say that discourses “govern.” [. . .] [Rather] a political rationality, such as neoliberalism, is that by which we are ubiquitously governed even as there will also be discourses crosscutting and incompletely contoured or controlled by such a rationality. (Brown 2015, 117)

Though in the last part of the quote, Brown suggests a possible excedence regarding the totalizing form of neoliberal rationality, her arguments do tend to emphasize that it produces a “soft and total” (Brown 2015, 208; my emphasis) form of government. I shall return later to these soft mechanisms operating by means of consensus12 (cf. Brown 2015, 35), through which neoliberalism governs, according to Brown. For now, I am interested in highlighting the fact that the emphasis on totality has consequences for the way in which dedemocratization is conceived from the humanist interpretive approach that seems to be the most prevalent in Brown’s book. The following passage allows us to appreciate that path and its problematic assumptions: As economic parameters become the only parameters for all conduct and concern, the limited form of human existence that Aristotle and later Hannah Arendt designated as “mere life” and that Marx called life “confined by necessity”— concern with survival and wealth acquisition—this limited form and imaginary becomes ubiquitous and total across classes. Neoliberal rationality eliminates what these thinkers termed “the good life” (Aristotle) or “the true realm of freedom” (Marx), by which they did not mean luxury, leisure, or indulgence, but

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rather the cultivation and expression of distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention. (Brown 2015, 43)

A not necessarily humanistic reading of the text might conclude that neoliberal economicism reduces spaces for freedom by limiting the multiple and heterogeneous possibilities of life, of bodies, of a field of experience, to one possibility considered to be the only real, viable, realizable possibility (something that the testimonies included at the beginning of this chapter might indicate). But the passage suggests something else that deserves to be critically discussed: in line with a long philosophical tradition, Brown affirms that neoliberalism tends to eliminate the capacities for freedom, understanding, first, that there are some human capacities for freedom (reason, articulated discourse, reflection), and that freedom is realizable according to one form of life, the good life, which has transcended the realm of needs and ceased to be mere life (zoé), in order to display itself as a form of life, as bíos, capable of logos, of reflection, of argumentation, and of deliberation. And in line with this, she states, “For Aristotle, Arendt, and Marx, the potential of the human species is realized not through, but beyond the struggle for existence and wealth accumulation” (Brown 2015, 43–44). It could well be argued that a body fixed to the accumulation of wealth loses its mobility and the possibility of asserting it in others, thus leading it to act as unemancipated, as the above-cited testimonies and Gauny’s cenobitic economy seem to do. But it is completely different to affirm that that a body compelled to the need of survival is necessarily a body incapable of freedom, as if the latter required transcending the realm of the necessary. The entire second chapter of this book may be seen as a refutation of this traditional idea. Moreover, the political scenes of equality that have emerged and continue to emerge today show that precarized bodies, thrown into mere survival, can, precisely from that situation, question such precarization and the incapacitating boundaries it produces. Brown’s humanist view is problematic because it presupposes that there are certain forms of life and capacities that make us human, and that those who cannot deploy them (e.g., less autonomous subjects) are unequally human, incapable of action, judgment, or freedom. Brown takes up Arendt’s suggestion that because the poor are doomed to necessity, they are incapable of action, of recognizing their invisibility and confronting it publicly. This can be seen clearly in her comments on a statement by John Adams, in which he refers to invisibilization as the most intolerable aspect of existing in misery: Obviously, it was the absence of misery which enabled John Adams to discover the political predicament of the poor, but his insight into the crippling consequences of obscurity, in contrast to the more obvious ruin which want brought to human life, could hardly be shared by the poor themselves. (Arendt 2006, 69–70)



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However, the equality manifested in the political scenes questions that distribution of capacities and incapacities and the understandings of the human it entails. Thus, it seems paradoxically inegalitarian for Brown to define dedemocratization in terms of certain democratic human capacities that neoliberalism and its economization would jeopardize and, even more, to define those capacities in terms of an individualistic liberalism that insists on the “moral autonomy” and the “individual sovereignty of subjects” (Brown 2015, 78–79, 99, 109). In fact, such emphasis on the sovereign autonomous subject loses sight of the historicity, the corporeality of subjects (a limitation that Brown herself has acknowledged elsewhere [see Brown 2011, 69]), and the affective interdependence that exposes them to one another and prevents them from having full control and self-determination regarding their lives. Moreover, as Nietzsche pointed out in several of his works, this emphasis on self-control of the sovereign subject leads to a very defensive immunitarian attitude whereby the subject seeks to dominate everything that exceeds it, threatens its capacity for control, and ends up taking revenge for that reason (cf. Nietzsche 2001, 173–74 [CJ, §305]). Therefore, this sovereign subject can end up being terribly violent against that which alters it: its affects, nature, animals, the historicity it is thrown into, which are configurations of the world that do not have sovereignty as their ideal. This sovereign individual then seeks to appropriate everything that can alter it and make it equal to itself, thus dispossessing both the world and itself of their difference. In this sense, it is possible to see that alleged sovereign as the possessive individual that needs to possess the other in order to reaffirm itself as an individual. Thus, this figure can be linked to, rather than separated from, a possessive logic of accumulation that, in its urge to dominate, dispossesses the other from itself. Likewise, these humanistic assumptions, combined with the logic of ideology, which, as we saw, Brown takes up from a certain reading of Marx, can lead her to paternalistic, not very emancipatory, statements. According to these, for example, the economization of everything, including education, would prevent subjects from grasping the forms of power and domination that subject them, for lack of critical formation, which, in turn, would contribute to their ideological manipulation, loss of their democratic “capacity” for autonomy, and, hence, to dedemocratization. In her words: “Democracy in an era of enormously complex global constellations and powers requires a people who are educated, thoughtful, and democratic in sensibility. This means a people modestly knowing about these constellations and powers” (Brown 2015, 199) and about the forms of “illusion of knowledge [and of] freedom” that these constellations and powers are producing (Brown 2015, 179). Critical thinking is, then, for Brown, as well as for Bourdieu and Althusser, and even a certain Marx, a question of knowledge, of recognition, of separating illusion from true knowledge. Nevertheless, as we saw in the Introduction,

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this unveiling logic of the critical dispositif is something that Rancière has invited us to challenge when he points out the inegalitarian effects it involves, given that it both establishes beforehand what a body can or cannot do due to its lack of knowledge or recognition, and defines which is the genuine social reality that bodies need to recognize. There is, however, another way of interpreting that dedemocratization, one that is less prevalent in Brown’s book, but for which it can offer interesting elements of analysis. In fact, one of the text’s most significant contributions is the analysis of the grammar of neoliberal discourses, revealing their assumptions and implications through a sort of archival work that gathers current statements and practices. Concretely, that grammar can be observed in the proliferation of notions such as “governance” and “responsibilization,” the reduction of right to an instrument of legitimization of neoliberal interventions, and the manner in which all of this gives rise to a logic of consensus that reduces conflict and antagonism, as constitutive of democracy. Along this path, it would be possible to suggest that dedemocratization is characterized not so much by the loss of certain capacities, but by the flattening and reduction of public space and its conflicts, which has effects on modes of relation among subjects. In the light of this second interpretation, a different emphasis is placed on the idea of democratic imaginary, conceived not in terms of the humanistic values of the individual, free subject, equal in rights, but as an imaginary that gradually took shape through social achievements and that, in addition to individual freedom and equality and the importance of participation in a given public space, underscores the necessary reconfiguration of that space in collective practices, due to the inevitable exclusions and inequalities it produces.13 In line with this second interpretation of dedemocratization, Brown provides an interesting account of the dissemination and different uses of the idea of “governance” in the dominant discourses, which I would like to dwell on briefly. Though the genealogy of the notion is debatable, it seems to stem from the world of business, where it refers to integrated, corporate, network-­ oriented, partly self-organized work that displaces governing through “hierarchically organized command and control” (Brown 2015, 123)—in corporations, nonprofit entities, and, increasingly, the state. In this context, “governance” is used interchangeably with “management” in both public and private environments, and, Lemke points out, suggests the idea of processes that should be managed according to certain standards and practices (Brown 2015, 124). As a result, the political is conceived as a “field of management” and the public realm as “a domain of strategies, techniques and procedures through which different forces and groups attempt to render their programs operable” (Brown 2015, 127).



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Moreover, as Brown (2015) herself highlights, it is quite significant that this narrowing of the public sphere is related to a strong emphasis on the fact that governance is achieved through consensus, which means that it is a question of solving problems that require certain interventions, of “what works,” and not of debating what the problems are and how to deal with them (127). The emphasis on consensus involves a transformation of democracy, now defined as “inclusion, participation, partnership, and teamwork in problem solving,” and no longer in terms of “pluralistic struggles” concerned with justice and “civic participation” (128). In the context of this prevailing rationality that underscores the authority of experts in decision-making and implementation processes, individuals are thought to be responsible for managing their lives according to these processes, to which they must commit (Brown 2015, 129). In this sense, “responsibilization” involves assigning workers, students, and marginalized people the task of “discerning and undertaking the correct strategies of selfinvestment and entrepreneurship for thriving and surviving” (Brown 2015, 132), over which they have no power of decision. At stake here is almost a moral requirement of individual self-responsibilization, that, as we have seen throughout this chapter, seeks to make subjects’ lives correspond to the prosperity and “growth of society,” that is, to the neoliberal project that establishes “that society” beyond the intervention capacity of the actors in this project. A news article published over a year ago in Colombia (I am reviewing it in January of 2019) allows us to appreciate the operation of that consensual logic in all of the aspects described above. The headline itself is quite telling “Government seeks to rein in popular consultations.”14 It refers to the fact that in 2017, several municipalities resorted to the constitutional figure of “popular consultation” to vote against large-scale mining projects in their territories, and states the government’s intention to restrict the popular participation mechanism. The news article then goes on to inform that the minister of finance and public credit announced the need for such restriction, in an event organized by the country’s power companies. There, “amidst the concern of investors over the proliferation of such plebiscites,” the minister committed to submitting a draft bill to Congress, whereby popular consultations would be regulated. In the minister’s words, as cited by a Colombian liberal newspaper, We are committed to asking Congress to legislate on the issue of popular consultations. We cannot allow the interests of very small minorities, a municipal council, to impose themselves on the needs of society as a whole. We need to resolve that in a way that provides guarantees and participation, doing a good

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job of socializing the projects in the communities, but we cannot have actors with veto power regarding projects the country needs. (quoted in El Espectador 2017)

The minister’s words make it clear that the interests of the corporations owning the mining companies must be guaranteed legally by the Colombian state, because it is assumed that said interests coincide with those of Colombian society. On the other hand, the manifestations of local communities against large-scale mining projects that affect the environment (common water resources, the air, the health of the population) are seen as minority interests that clash with the alleged interest of the majority so that it would be selfish to privilege them. According to this paradoxical opinion, the interests of large corporations are the interest of all, and the decision of local communities regarding their territory and the environment is selfish. The article also highlights the technical character of the minister’s opinion: the fact that these mining projects will bring already studied, quantifiable economic benefits to the country. Thus, it becomes a problem when local minorities, ignorant of that “information,” have a say and a vote in decisions that affect the country. That is why the minister insists that the regulation of the consultations has to go hand in hand with the socialization of the investment projects: people have to “understand” their benefits in order to be convinced. However, in the context of this logic that Rancière has called consensual, some of whose elements Brown has allowed us to appreciate, it is impossible to “understand” that it is not a matter of ignorance, but of a profound disagreement regarding “the good of society” and the common: between the common conceived from the perspective of financialization and economic prosperity and the common construed from life in the territories and the environmental concerns linked to a form of life, to good living. These issues should concern not only Colombians but also the inhabitants of the world, especially the precarized population that is the most affected by environmental damage (droughts, extreme cold or heat, the floods occurring today in many geographies). The above considerations make it possible to introduce an aspect of this currently prevailing logic, mentioned in the Introduction but not yet explicitly discussed: its “de-corporealization” or “dematerialization,” and which is not to be confused with the question of “the incorporeal,” which we have already discussed. As I shall specify in section 2, it is a question of how this logic attaches bodies to certain tasks and objectives, closing them off to possibilities that exceed what is thinkable as real or given according to that regime of sense. However, what I would like to develop now is the manner in which this closing off, materialized in affects and forms of thinking of bodies, produces extremely dematerialized forms of experience, in which subjects are detached



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from their historical localization, from their interdependence with other (human and nonhuman) bodies, their ecosystemic dependence, their fragility as agents that belong to larger assemblages they are thrown into, assemblages marked by the traces of buried histories, invisibilized names, and innumerable defeated, anonymous lives. Rancière refers to this dependence that exposes one to being inhabited by others, to being other (cf. Rancière 1998, 147). This is what I have called, at different moments, the relational dependence of bodies, a relationality that denies and aims at blocking neoliberalism and its consensual logic; hence its very material dematerialization and its decorporealization by establishing certain bodies as ideal. Thus, although this neoliberal body that is responsible for its self-­ fulfillment can be a very vigorexic body (Cano 2015, 23–24) that seeks the greatest possible accumulation of energy and bodily strength and strives to achieve a certain type of figure (healthy, thin, efficient), it is also a body that cancels the historicity and materiality of its corporeality, as an assemblage of positions, images, discourses, affective sedimentations, all of which can be altered. This argument also illustrates the link between this subject as an entrepreneur of itself and the figure of the sovereign, autonomous subject.15 The latter, with its will to self-control, is a subject that seeks to dominate the “concrete corporeal, material, and spatial” (Cano 2015, 111–12) experience it is thrown into, which is also the abovementioned space of relationality: the in between of feelings and affects, which passes through subjects insofar as they never exactly own themselves. This is also a space where common vindications may emerge, manifesting that exposure to others in forms of expression that are dissensual with respect to the practices established in order to regulate or cancel that interdependence. These elements, then, may help understand why I suggested in the Introduction to this book that the grammar of the sovereign subject, which Brown continues to resort to, is unable to counter the rationality of neoliberalism and the effects of its consensual logic. This grammar has been appropriated by the logic of our times. 3.2.  CONSENSUAL LOGIC Consensualism, far more than referring to the soft means used by neoliberal rationality (Brown), to the firm belief that neoliberalism as ideology produces in actors manipulated by its resources (Harvey), or to a reasonable agreement between parties (à la Habermas), is the logic prevailing in the present. This logic appears precisely when consensus is conceived as the form of government suited to the times, one that avoids conflicts by appealing to expertise, arbitration, and the agreement of the involved sectors of the population (cf. Rancière 2010c, 143–44). In particular, this logic may be characterized on the

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basis of two related registers: either by addressing the government practices or operations it entails or by analyzing the forms of “distribution of the sensible” it involves. On the one hand, we have a series of state practices reflecting the worldview prevalent after the fall of the Soviet bloc, which assumes the unquestionable victory of capitalism, the defeat of any other alternative, and, therefore, the affirmation of a “global world order.” This means a world structured according to the laws of the market and profit-making, and, more exactly, to forms of relation among the state, supra-state institutions, and financial institutions that define the way in which national governments reflect within the nation the consequences of the global order—in the destruction of systems of solidarity, protection and social security, in diminishing job security, and in the liquidation or privatization, when it’s profitable, of what were public assets, the domain of the common. (Rancière 2016c, 151)

It is precisely because those practices assume that there is a “global world order” that they mobilize a logic, a certain way of giving sense, of establishing certain relations between forms of perception and the senses produced. In the case of consensual logic, we have a system of evidences within which certain operations necessarily make sense. Or, more precisely, in the aesthetic-cartographic terms we have adopted, it is an agreement established as univocal between a certain regime of sense and a mode of sensible presentation that allows that regime to be seen, felt, heard as what is, as what there is, as verifiable evidence. The idea of a global order suggests that there is a normative or regulative order (more than a merely natural one, as in classic liberalism) that establishes the way things should be according to some privileged forms of knowledge (economic, sociological, political scientific) that account for the real, for the “one unique reality to which everything must be related, a reality that is experienceable as a sense datum and which has only one possible signification” (Rancière 2010b, 144). Globalization, economic growth, democratization, reasonable behavior of the part of social agents, progress, and the logic of inclusion are examples of this. Faced with this reality, the only thing needed is expert knowledge of the problems and solutions, and the only choice is to “manage necessity” (see Rancière 2010b, 144). That is why consensus also refers to “the need for a government of experts” that provides the keys to understanding what happens, a technocracy whose other side is the opacity of the social for most of those who participate in it. All of this already indicates that consensus involves an understanding of the common that reduces the dimension of conflict in social life, but not only because different views of social reality are not acknowledged, and not so much because public space ceases to be considered a space for deliberation



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and becomes a space for the management and administration of necessary things. Conflict is reduced or even suppressed due to the closing of the space in which truly other interpretations of social reality can appear, that is, different social realities that counter the dominant views and, particularly, their inegalitarian effects.16 And conflict is also reduced because the political space is conceived as a space, either for rational discussion among actors capable of accepting “the best arguments” or for negotiation among economically reasonable actors. Thus, the way in which political actions can divide and open up debate over the spaces authorized for participation (deliberation or negotiation), over the actors or parties that can participate in them, and over their “reasonability” (as I shall discuss in chapter 4) is ignored. For this reason, The essence of consensus [. . .] 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. (Rancière 2010b, 42)

Thus, consensus is more than a police logic, that is to say, more than a conjunctive relation (that fixes and excludes) between sense and sense, given that it is a logic aimed at transforming every relation and assemblage of sense into a conjunctive relation and assemblage (police). But these boundaries are no longer seen as boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (e.g., among classes and power groups) that can give rise to conflicts, but as criteria that define and make it possible to identify sectors, phenomena (population groups, social identities, roles), and problems to be resolved “by experts,” responsible for the “negotiated adjustment of interests” (Rancière 2004b, 206), or for determining the means and objective conditions for their solution. Nevertheless, when boundaries are denied as boundaries, the distributions of meaning are invisibilized, thus also closing off the spaces where gaps and intervals may appear between those boundaries. For this reason, Rancière speaks of consensus in terms of a meta-police17 (Rancière 1995, 157), and defines it as “closing the spaces of dissensus by plugging the intervals and patching over the possible gaps between appearance and reality or law and fact” (Rancière 2004b, 206). And for that same reason, he characterizes it as a closing that causes the reduction of the political space, since the political, in its different registers and expressions, as anticipated in chapter 1, has to do precisely with those gaps-intervals that allow for the dissensual destabilization, disassembling, and reassembling of the given boundaries in a field of experience. Tracing the most visible ways in which this closing of the political space is produced today, according to Rancière, will allow us to examine, from an aesthetic-cartographic perspective, some of the elements discussed in

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the first part of this chapter, appreciate others and their relations, and rethink the relation between these elements and the idea of dispossession. 3.2.1.  The Community of Consensus The objective of consensus is to count exhaustively the interest groups and types of individuals that make up the “population,” as a sum, with no supplement (Rancière 2010b, 100), given that it seeks a “pre-determined agreement among subjects, places, modes of enunciation, and forms of efficacy” (­Rancière 2017a, 72). This is assumed in public policies, institutional arrangements, forms of public-private management, and multiple sociological and political science studies aimed at identifying, representing, or including the different population groups (according to very different variables), ethnic groups, and vulnerable sectors, and what they may “need” or “think,” “what they can say,” “what they can do,” as well as the problems that may arise and the adequate ways of dealing with them. This exhaustive count without a supplement presupposes that there is a social space with its own dynamics and forms of normality and abnormality, from which certain actors may sometimes be excluded or marginalized. In this sense, it is a logic of inclusion that gradually reduces margins, exclusions, lags with respect to certain intervention programs aimed at fostering economic growth, or regarding certain dominant forms of social intelligibility, in order to gradually close the gaps between law and reality and the division among different understandings of freedom, justice, culture, well-being, and time. Therefore, consensus designs programs of “assistance,” “integration,” and “humanitarian management.” But what consensualism’s “fight against exclusion” evinces is “also the paradoxical conceptual place where exclusion emerges as just another name for consensus” (Rancière 1999, 115). Because the fact is that exclusion is also a way of rendering invisible the outlines of belonging that consensus itself traces: the arbitrariness of boundaries that no longer function as boundaries between the proper and the improper, between what is counted as a part that belongs and one that is marginalized, and become, instead, boundaries of the world, of what is and what can be, and into which it is necessary to gradually integrate those marginalized due to lack of opportunities to develop certain competences, those who require more assistance to allegedly “thrive.” The only thing needed in view of any mismatch, collapse, or trauma is “a personal medicine aimed at restoring identities,” psychological treatments leading to “social reinsertion,” which combine with a “societal medicine aimed at mending the community fabric, to give back to each person excluded the identity of a mobilized capacity and responsibility” (Rancière 1999, 117). As we have seen, this responsibility is nothing other than the task assigned



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to individuals of adjusting their capacities and “competences” to what society requires of them, in a specular link among individual, society, and state. Anything that resists this task immediately becomes “a matter of marginality, migration, pathology, delinquency, terrorism and so on” (Rancière 2016c, 152). For this reason, as we saw through Harvey’s considerations, this system “is forced to endow itself with reinforced police tools to control the margins and the leaks that it necessarily never ceases creating” (152). In this sense, Rancière could agree with Brown that the community of consensus is the Platonic community of incarnation, of the perfect agreement between state and individuals, between the parts of the state and the parts of the soul, between political and legal institutions and the substance of the social (the state of social relations) (cf. Rancière 1999, 102ff.). All of these parts are geared toward the idea of a certain economic prosperity (measurable in terms of capital value) and of a certain social integration that depends on the former and which is legitimized through legal instruments, as we shall see below. 3.2.2.  The Law of Consensus Right, or more exactly, a certain formulation of right, is fundamental in order to guarantee that agreement of economy, society, ways of life, and mentalities, which consensual logic aims at (see Rancière 1999, 107). Indeed, ­Rancière defines consensus as “a particular mode of visibility of right as arkhé of the community” (Rancière 1999, 107). In consensual regimes, any political controversy becomes a legal problem, that is, a problem that can be defined and resolved by “expert sages who say what is in keeping with the spirit of the constitution and the essence of the community it defines” (108–9), as if these principles were not open and capable of being appropriated in many ways, without having to define a form of life and a spirit recognizable only by constitutional experts. This also entails the cancellation of the political use of right and, with it, the neutralization of its polyvalence (see Rancière 1999, 107). Thus, according to consensual logic, all heterogeneous uses of right are reduced to a sole regime that ensures the juridicalization of the political, its subordination to the state, and, therefore, the elimination of the possibility that right might be appropriated by ordinary people to manifest disagreement, as a political structure for the demonstration of a wrong. At the same time, this juridicalization of the political goes hand in hand with an increasing proliferation of settings regulated by this reduced system of right, by “multiplying and redefining rights” and laws, “adapting [them] to and anticipating all movements of society.” For example, “property law is ceaselessly running to catch up with the intangible property linked to the new technologies” (Rancière 1999, 111). This involves the multiplication of

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laws regulating patents and copyrights, as well as the uses and circulation of knowledge, and many times, ancestral, unwritten, and, of course, unpatented uses and knowledges are appropriated, including live beings, such as seeds and “biological and genetic reserves” (cf. Dardot and Laval 2014, 119). In the meantime, “committees of savants, gathered together in the name of bioethics, promise to clarify for the legislator the point at which man’s humanity begins.” And the right to work becomes more flexible, adapting “to all the movements of the economy and to all the shifts in the employment market” (Rancière 1999, 111).18 Thus, the juridicalization of the social field that produces its privatization runs parallel to the dismantling and destruction of social rights, as we have been reiterating throughout this chapter. It is as if now people only had the right to exercise the responsibility of belonging to a collective enterprise they must integrate into, since integration is guaranteed by law, though it might require sacrifices at times, for example, job flexibilization, in order to allegedly improve employability and contribute to future growth. And it is also as if the increasing reduction of right to legal norms that guarantee “the management of market forces,” through legislation that fosters the insertion of states into international markets, would guarantee the perfect agreement between the real and the rational, between what is considered physis and what is considered nómos, which is, precisely, the conformity of consensus. 3.2.3.  Comprehensive Inclusion and Its Immunitarian Facet In other words, “disintegration” is another name for this saturation that knows no other form of being-in-common than the specular link between individual satisfaction and the state’s auto-demonstration. (Rancière 1999, 115)

In his reflections on consensualism, Rancière has also addressed something that is crucial for our present, as I suggested in the Introduction, namely, certain immunitarian expressions of rejection that establish certain “others” as enemies through stigmatizing discourses that cause the circulation of destructive affects of fear, resentment, and hatred, that is, discourses that block forms of interdependence and solidarity among bodies. As we saw above, Harvey has recognized this in his works on neoliberalism: on the one hand, mobilizing classical Marxist tools make it possible to read some of the phenomena involved here as an expression of the disintegration, the lack of sociability, the individualism promoted by capitalism’s individualistic, liberal ideology. On the other hand, Harvey (2005, 50) has also suggested that neoliberalism’s conservative shift has promoted certain stigmatizing practices in the name of race and/or certain forms of assuming



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religion and cultural belonging in nationalist, homophobic, and anti-feminist terms.19 In several of his works, Rancière (2007a, 2008a) has challenged the Marxist critical diagnosis against bourgeois individualism, stating that this critique, which is reproduced today whenever market individualism and bourgeois democracy are denounced, can be traced back to counterrevolutionary positions (such as Burke’s) vis-à-vis the French Revolution, which criticized how by proclaiming individual freedoms, the revolution had destroyed community bonds and produced disengaged, anomic individuals, detached from the community. In this manner, Rancière suggests that these criticisms reveal fear of those elements and practices that tear up given communities, of those fractures that, according to Rancière, also allow for other configurations of the common and emancipatory political experiences. Let us clarify a few points. I have suggested in this chapter that Rancière’s perspective might have points in common with approaches that invite us to question the figure of the sovereign, autonomous subject and its understanding of subjects as self-determining, self-sufficient individuals. This questioning has to do with a comprehension of agency that stresses subjects’ thrownness into conditions of language, historicity, and affects that can be seen as a certain in-between, as a certain relationality or interdependence of bodies. But I have also emphasized that this relationality refers to heterogeneous and conflictive assemblages, upon which subjects can intervene, and not to an organic unity or community of sense, or to a well-assembled web of relations, which certain Marxist critiques of individualism seem to long for.20 This is why Rancière has insisted that political emancipation has to do above all with breaking away from “the harmonious fabric of community,” which in fact establishes police logic, especially in its current consensual manifestations (see Rancière 2009d, 42). For this very same reason, the abovementioned disintegration effect is neither seen as a consequence of liberal individualism nor as the result of conservative positions in tension with liberalism. Rather, it is understood as an effect linked to consensualism. In particular, the idea is to think that those immunitarian forms of separation and rejection of the other so common today (Rancière speaks from France, but this phenomenon occurs in different parts of the world), the “disintegration,” in terms of the quote, has to do with the “saturation” produced by consensual logic. Let us delve into this point. Of course, stigmatizations of the other as undesirable are very old in Western culture, and with them, forms of racism, xenophobia, or discrimination. And it is possible to discern important discursive differences between a neoconservative discourse such as Le Pen’s or that of certain American right-wing leaders and the politically inclusive, politically correct language of Angela Merkel, Macron, or Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, it is evident that

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these diverse discourses can give rise to differentiated public policies, for example, regarding values, education, economic opening, or certain degrees of protectionism. However, the interesting point made by Rancière is that the consensual language of inclusion and political correctness, linked to stabilizing understandings of social identities and of the common space, as well as to interventions that have dismantled the forms of social solidarity, fosters rather than counters these forms of immunity, whose brazenly excluding discourses might appear to be counter-consensual. In this sense, Rancière affirms, The constitution of each individual as a threat to the community, are the strict correlate of the consensual requirement of a community wholly realized as the identity between the people and the population reflected in each person [. . .]. This equivalence is illustrated by the violent intrusion of new forms of racism and xenophobia into our consensus regimes. (Rancière 1999, 117)

Consensus, then, with its specular logic of inclusion, also produces fear of the other as a threat, which, of course, can be combined with very archaic affects. In saying this, I am not losing sight of the fact that economic and sociological reasons can be offered for this, which can even be linked to the neoliberal interventions discussed in this chapter (precarization, “unemployment causing people to accuse the foreigner of taking the local’s place, unbridled urbanization, the dereliction of the suburbs and dormitory towns” [Rancière 1999, 117]). However, the point is precisely to stop seeing immediate causal relations between economic and social phenomena, in order to think these circumstances in their complex aesthetic-political dimension, and to consider the distributions of the sensible from which they emerge. In other words, it is necessary to stop thinking that bodies simply react with hate or resentment because they loathe their deplorable marginalization and need to blame someone as responsible for their situation. Rather, we need to think about why that indignation targets an inadmissible other who is blamed for the situation, instead of targeting social practices that distribute the common unequally. Why does that indignation lead to immunitarian affects that end up reiterating those distributions, instead of to political dispute over the manner in which the common is distributed? The answer may be anticipated by taking into account that political dispute is less likely when the order of time has closed off those spaces in which “litigious objects” and “disputing subjects” might appear, by reducing the forms in which problems can be addressed as problems of justice, of distribution of the common. Today, rather, problems are conceived as solvable through programmed technical interventions. This argument can be linked to the very way in which a consensual logic operates. In fact, as suggested above, in our current consensual orders, it is inadmissible for fissures or gaps-intervals



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(écarts) to appear, since they disarrange the manner in which institutional dispositifs seek to assemble themselves with the state of social relations. Thus, the following are inadmissible: words and ways of seeing that do not let themselves be treated, whether from the order of right or that of humanitarian or economic management, as countable issues that can be objectified in opinion polls—and existences that resist the discourse of inclusion and the claim of a community with no excedence (Quintana 2013b, 37). Also inadmissible in a consensual order is the proliferation of unidentifiable bodies that create confusion in the given order of bodies and which challenge the directions and senses that establish the “common,” the “evident,” or the “normal,” by asserting themselves as the excess of the community. These are altered bodies or bodies that produce alteration, impede consensus, and prevent the community, as a well-integrated space of contracting subjects, from fully coinciding with itself (Quintana 2013b, 3). Consensual logic is thus an immunitarian logic. Rancière illustrates this very well on the basis of the practices and discourses related to immigration, which have appeared since the 1990s, in both right-wing and socialist governments, between which there is consensus in this respect. In his text “The Inadmissible” (Rancière 1998, 128–47), Rancière pays special attention to two interventions carried out during the Mitterrand and Chirac administrations, which are especially revealing regarding this immunitarian logic of consensus. The first is a statement by Prime Minister Michel Rocard, during Mitterand’s second term, according to which “France cannot embrace the misery of the whole world,” which, according to Rancière, summarizes the graffiti usually found in public bathrooms in French cities. The second one refers to “the legislative arsenal of the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws on security and immigration,” under Chirac’s mandate. In the case of the first statement, a decision is made on the basis of a previous discrimination and though it does not seem to be based on any determinable property, it does delimit what is “their own” by creating a partition between “what can” and “what cannot be embraced.” Now then, according to Rancière, an effort is made to delimit this excluded “bad part” precisely through a legal intervention such as the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws, which ended up creating the figure of the Other that cannot be embraced (the foreigner as clandestine and criminal due to their irregular status),21 that immigrant Other who does not coincide with the sameness of French identity, and is, therefore, a potential criminal (Rancière 1998, 135). What this law does, says Rancière, is merely to “objectify” a feeling of insecurity (like the one expressed in the graffiti in French bathrooms), thus transforming a multiplicity of groups and bodies that created confusion in their ordering into a single object. In this sense, it is the law “that constitutes the untraceable object ‘­immigrant’ by unifying the heterogeneous cases of the juvenile delinquent of

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North African origin, the Sri Lankan worker without papers, the polygamous Muslim, and the worker from Mali who forces the upkeep of his family on the French community” (Rancière 1999, 121). This convertibility of the One of feeling into the One of the concept is typical of the consensual order and of the “operators of conversion” that it circulates: those that link the foreigner to the criminal in the figure of the clandestine individual. It is this logic that constructs “the figure of the overabundant multiple that reproduces itself lawlessly” (Rancière 1999, 121), that makes that multiple appear as the bad part (Rancière 1998, 137), and that has to make the Other countable within a race, an ethnic group, or a social identity. Given the above, consensual discourse never ceases to be ethnic and racialized, even in its more tolerant multicultural varieties, since that is the way in which it can count, manage, and integrate difference so that it does not overabound lawlessly. Because this logic needs countable parts, “real bodies endowed with properties expressed by their name” (Rancière 1999, 124), whether individuals of the x or y type, definable social groups, or ethnic communities, and “what it no longer tolerates is the supernumerary party, the one that throws out the count of the community” (123–24). This is also the root of the securitarian tendency of these consensual orders, which I stressed at the beginning of the chapter: the fact that they can resort to physical violence and police coercion in order to control political demonstrations that confront them. Fear of the excessive multiple is installed precisely because it prevents consensus from being (Rancière 1998, 138). But that “bad part” that is not allowed to express itself as a political subject appears “in the nakedness of their intolerable difference,” whether as a vulnerable, victimized ethnic body in need of humanitarian assistance or as the bad, racialized body of the potentially dangerous colored immigrant, as the hateful, “diabolical” body that is nothing but “a hangover from the consensus operation” (119). For this reason, “the optimal form of consensus is one cemented through the fear of a society” of the other that disrupts it (cf. Rancière 2010b, 106).

3.2.4.  Total Exhibition and the Reduction of Heterogeneity It is the exhaustive breakdown of the interminably polled population that produces, in place of the people declared archaic, this subject called “the French”; who turn up, alongside prognostics about the “political” future of this or that undersecretary of state, in a few decidedly uncompromising opinions about the excessive number of foreigners and the inadequacy of the crackdown on them [. . .]. The subject who opines accordingly is the subject of this new mode of the visible where everything is on display, up for grabs, a subject called on to live out all his fantasies in a world of total exhibition and of the asymptotic coming together of bodies, in this



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“everything is possible” of thrills displayed and promised meaning, of course, doomed to disappointment: the subject being urged accordingly to search and destroy the “bad body,” the diabolical body that everywhere stands in the way of the total satisfaction everywhere within reach and everywhere snatched from one’s grasp. (Rancière 1999, 119–20)

This fragment is interesting because it makes it possible to link the immunitarian version of consensualism with the manner in which this logic produces a distribution of the sensible characterized by “generalized ostentation,” which some, though not Rancière, relate to the diagnosis of the “society of the spectacle” and post-truth. Polling is one of the tools privileged by consensus, because it establishes the social positions, places, and roles of the interviewees and makes them correspond to certain opinions, always in response to simplifying questions. Moreover, this methodology and the questions it poses establish consensual subjects such as “the French,” which, once identified thus, are invited to formulate specters, fears, attacks, in which some other is blamed for the deceptions they necessarily experience in a consensual order. We see it every day in Colombia; day after day, morning news radio programs and TV evening news broadcasts carry out opinion polls, asking things like: “Do you agree with gay marriages?” or “Do you agree with adoption by same-sex couples?” It is not hard to see that these questions identify a danger, a problem, a potential threat that needs to be inquired into, but that is thereby established and circulated as such, sometimes even in ways that go viral. These opinion polls thus serve to consolidate consensual saturation and its integrating or stigmatizing forms of identification of any possibly disruptive other. These considerations can also be linked to the forms of exhibition produced by consensualism. This is the logic we see displayed all the time in the mainstream media, which claim to capture the facts, that which happens minute after minute. However, this regime of general visibility does not have to be read in terms of Debord’s society of the spectacle or of ­Baudrillard’s ­simulacrum (Rancière 2009d, 1–52). An interpretation like Debord’s reproduces the demystifying critical dispositif of inversion that presupposes the inequality of intellects; furthermore, it fails to account for the important depoliticizing effects produced by that regime. In Rancière’s words, The regime of the all-visible, of the endless presentation to each and every one of us of a real indissociable from its image, is not the liberation of appearance. It is, on the contrary, its loss. The world of total visibility carves out a real where appearance has no place to occur or to produce its divisive, fragmenting effects. Appearance, particularly political appearance, does not conceal reality but in fact splinters it [. . .]. The “loss of the real” is in fact a loss of appearance. (Rancière 1999, 104)

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These words could not be more counter-consensual, more contrary to the realism of consensus that establishes a certain reality as what is and what there is. This is why that realism that “claims to be that sane attitude of mind that sticks to observable realities” is nothing other than “the police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only doing the only thing possible to do” (Rancière 1999, 132). The realism of those who currently denounce “post-truth” reiterates the regime of consensual exhibition that it claims to denounce, as we shall see below. In any case, this anti-realism is not an idealist or subjective idealist position claiming that “everything is possible”; on the contrary, it is consensual realism, no matter how counterintuitive it might seem, that brings about that “everything is possible,” through its regime of comprehensive presentation. Rather, insisting on anti-realism means emphasizing the aesthetic-cartographic methodology and “materiality of the incorporeal,” the materiality of that which has no place in a certain regime of sense and perception, but which could have it by torsioning some of its boundaries. Let us examine this. In various places, particularly in his more “aesthetic” texts, Rancière has pointed out that “the real in itself does not exist; there are, rather, configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions, our thoughts, and our interventions” (Rancière 2008a, 83–84).22 In this sense, the real is always the object of a fiction, understood not as a subjective, arbitrary creation—an idea of fiction that belongs to the realist, representative regime, which is being questioned here—but as “material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be” (Rancière 2004c, 39). To say, then, that the real is always the object of a fiction is to highlight its material construction (because it has effects on bodies, their relations, and the world they inhabit) of space in heterogeneous assemblages that link together “the perceptible, the sayable and the feasible” (Rancière 2008a, 84).23 The realism of consensual logic denies its fictional character, asserting itself as the real as such and excluding those constructions that exceed its boundaries of intelligibility as appearances, utopias, or illusions. Thus, it closes off the field of the possible by denying its heterogeneity and instability, that is, the manner in which it can be challenged by constructions that appear as possible on the basis of displacements and torsions at the boundaries that made them illegible. For this reason, Rancière describes consensus as a regime that tries to eliminate the appearance that divides it, the forms of appearance that show other possibilities and open up disagreement with respect to the given ones. It is, therefore, a regime of comprehensive visibility that tries to make visible exhaustively everything that is, everything that there is, losing sight of the fact that its boundaries are also boundaries of visibility and invisibility.



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Of course, Rancière is not denying that things happen and that they fracture lives. But the manner in which we relate to and narrate those events always takes place in distributions of sense and perception that can more or less provide an account of the fracture produced by the event and how it affected the persons involved in different ways. Rancière highlights this in several of his texts dedicated to the politics of images, in which he emphasizes that the problem is not that the consensual media overwhelm us with too many images that conceal what actually happened. Rather, the issue is that these images show little of what happened and of the heterogeneity of its diverse effects. As we shall see in chapter 6, these are images that discard and overly select what can appear and what cannot appear, by ordering it in a very specific way. In this sense, the consensual media are not content with reducing the number of images made available. Above all they order the way they are staged. That is what is meant by in-form in the dominant system: put into form eliminating any singularity in the images, everything in them that exceeds the simple redundancy of content that conveys meaning. (Rancière 2007c, 75)

That is why we constantly hear voice-overs narrating what we should see in the images we are shown, or experts giving meaning and “deciphering” what is happening; or we read subtitles that we are meant to match to the terrible images we sometimes find in newspapers, whose literal explanation divests them of the power to interpellate the reader. And we see the same images again and again. Think, for example, of the broadcasts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the media companies circulated and sold to one another; in those reiterated images, “there are hardly any violent, mutilated, or suffering bodies. What we see mainly are the faces of those who ‘make’ the news, the authorized speakers” (Rancière 2007c, 75). And if we see bodies that have suffered violence, we see them as vulnerable, massacred, merely victimized bodies. Few faces look back at us from those few ordered images to interrogate us about what happened, faces that, in their pain, can assert their equal capacity for thought and action, bodies that are allowed to speak in their own voice without a journalist or commentator leading their answers or cutting them off quickly. This is why it is so important to create other forms of visibility that show us other things differently and interpellate us, challenging the consensual visibility regime (I shall revisit and develop these considerations in chapter 6). This is no post-truth, as if there had ever been a faithful portrayal of reality that is now being betrayed; rather, we have a reduction of reality to a single presentation, interpretation, and meaning,24 a reduction that can come to be so simplifying and reductive in its montages that it loses all contact with

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the heterogeneity and conflict of the world, inventing what did not happen, distorting and unilaterally presenting what happened, and making possible the “anything goes.” But if these crude montages are possible, it is because reality, with its divisions and possibilities, has been reduced by consensual representation. 3.2.5.  The Necessity of Time and the Dispossession of Bodies The logic of saturation we have been discussing entails a certain narrative of time whose effect is the dispossession of bodies. Concretely, this logic establishes a “state of things” as that which is, according to inevitable economic and social processes to which individuals must adapt, taking on tasks that allow for their integration into these processes. As Povinelli has also pointed out, this is a teleological time guided by unquestionable objectives that structure temporality as a progression, establishing fixed boundaries between what “comes before” and is now past, and what come later as future (cf. Povinelli 2011, 13). This temporal narrative transforms the daily life ruled by that logic into problems of “thresholds,” “scale,” and realization of certain goals aimed at making possible a programmed future. Likewise, this temporal narrative closes off spaces for experiences that occur between times; for example, between “the future anterior” of the “will have been” (of what has not been and can be) and the “past perfect” of what has been and continues to be (Povinelli 2011, 13). Thus, it is also a narrative that makes certain things unthinkable and impossible, particularly the intervals between certain traces of the past and the desires of other worlds, which can also be possible. In speaking of “the state of the world” or the “state of things,” this narrative dictates time as principle of impossibility (Rancière 2011c, 1): to say “times have changed” means that x or y are no longer possible; there are things that can no longer be because they do not match the state of things, or what can be. And that which can no longer be, says Rancière, is, above all, “the possibility of changing the state of things” (Rancière 2011c, 1). In this sense, impossibility functions as an interdiction: “ ‘there are things you can no longer do, ideas in which you can no longer believe, futures that you can no longer imagine.’ But this ‘you cannot’ already clearly means ‘you must not’ ” (1). At stake then is a normative order that decides on possibility and hence on the power, the potency, the capacity of bodies: the capacities that can occur, the type of agency corresponding to the times. Therefore, this narrative dispossesses bodies: it denies them their mobility, the capacity to deploy other capacities that exceed the legitimized ones; it also denies them the capacity of decision outside the times defined, assigned for political-social



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life. Everything would need to fit into those defined times: electoral time; the convergence among individual time, institutional times, and the economic process; the time of events and their necessary deciphering or explanation (Rancière 2011c, 5). Thus arises an understanding of temporality that not only loses sight of the historical contingency of its assumptions, by making them practically normative or regulative, but also omits the conflictive nature of historicity, by thinking the present as a homogeneous global time: the time of progress, of globalization, of the market and its inevitable laws, of elections with their established periodicity; the time of inescapable predictions about a future whose possibilities are already contained in what we are and just await our possibilities of adaptation. It is as if there were one homogeneous, unitary past to be left behind, in the name of an equally homogeneous and unitary future that would be gradually produced through constant self-innovation. Such a construction ends up by closing the opening of past and future, that is, the possibility that the former can be reread, illuminating unforeseen possibilities for that which is to come, and hence the possibility of conflict between the ways of interpreting what has been and what can be. However, and this is a decisive point, by closing the conflict of temporality, this logic also seeks to inhibit the desire for transformation, the desire for what has not been and is not totally foreseeable. Hence, consensus is, above all, a narrative that dispossesses bodies of the desire for transformation, for being differently, for emancipation. If people consent to a “state of things” that seems to be totally contrary to their material interests, if people vote for x or y candidate who promises a change that is merely the reiteration of current conditions or even their worsening, it is not because they have been idiotized. Rather, they have become convinced that things cannot be otherwise; they have lost confidence in that they might be otherwise; and they have become skeptical. They are constantly skeptical about things (economic powers, the media, political representation), which they do not think they can change (cf. Rancière 2017a, 18–19). In this way, the inegalitarian logic that establishes the superiority of some over others provides those established as inferior with the means to think that they are thus exercising their superiority. This is what Jacotot, the ignorant schoolmaster, called “the logic of the superior inferiors” (cf. Rancière 2017a, 18–19). This is also why political actions that can challenge and destabilize consensual logic are actions that assert other bodies, different ways of being with others, other times, other worlds that open up the field of the possible, within a world in which possibilities have been closed off by the boundaries fixed by consensus—worlds that affirm, first of all, the equality of intelligence, the confidence in what bodies can do, despite everything, the confidence that things can actually change.

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NOTES   1.  The members of the research group “Forms of political action by civil society” (Centro de Estudios Sociales—Uniandes).   2.  By commonality, goods, and uses, I am not referring to something given or essential, but rather to ways of acting together, to collective practices and forms of organization that make it possible to produce subjects, arrangements, and things in common. This will become more clear after the discussion in chapters 4 and 5.   3.  In any case, as Dardot and Laval (2014) have pointed out, it is important to bear in mind that “deregulation” is an ambiguous term: though one might suppose that it means that capitalism is free of any form of regulation, it might rather indicate “a new ordering of economic activities, social relations, conduct and subjectivities” (176).   4. As Thomas Piketty has argued with respect to post-Keynesian capitalism, in his best-selling Le Capital au XXIème siècle (2013).   5.  With the dictatorships that, especially in Chile, mobilized the neoliberal project between 1975 and 1990.   6.  In fact, many social organizations in Colombia have repeatedly denounced that the territorial investment projects promoted by the state, in association with corporations, have been often imposed violently, using both state and para-state armies to displace populations from strategic lands.   7.  According to Epstein, financialization “means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (Epstein 2005, 3).   8.  It is important to emphasize that for Rancière this fabric of solidarity is not homogeneous; it is the possibility of spaces and relations in which encounters that are also conflictive can be traced.  9. For this reason, as Petras and Veltmeyer highlight, the objective of the “Washington Consensus” (1989)—and it is significant that the term “consensus” is used here, for reasons I shall provide later—was to establish a form of development thought to be more inclusive, “based on a new social policy targeted at the poor, and a new development paradigm according to which the poor are to be empowered to act for themselves.” This actually means that they must “take responsibility for their own development,” that is, for their expected development according to neoliberal public policy neoliberal (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011, 20). 10.  This idea, with different resonances, will also appear in Rancière’s reflections on consensualism. 11.  It is important to recall that for Foucault, forms of domination saturate the field of experience and the mobility of subjects by coercing them, while forms of power rule conduct and produce it on the basis of a certain mobility of subjects (Foucault 1982, 790). Of course Brown, as an expert in Foucault, takes this difference into account and her use of the notion of domination throughout the book is not naive. 12.  But consensus does not have to refer simply to the use of certain means that are not physically or directly coercive; consensus is a logic that can also justify the use of coercive and violent means (I shall revisit this in section 2).



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13. As Balibar (2010) and certain radical understandings of democracy hold (Mouffe 1992, 2000, 2013). One could argue that two different comprehensions of democracy are found in Brown’s text: a more liberal, individualistic one, and another, more inspired in Machiavelli (Brown 2015, 127) and linked to radical democracy models. 14.  See Redacción Económica (2017). 15.  Figures that are sometimes set in opposition to each other, as in Habermas; for example, in his text “Learning from Catastrophe,” cited by Brown (2006, 703). 16.  Anticipating an objection: Rancière does not claim that consensualism annuls truly different views of social reality, such as those offered, for example, by scientific views of climate change. Denying climate change is not really a different view, since it depends on assumptions that are part of consensualism, for instance, the reality of economic growth, which also fosters a certain “ecological awareness”; however, it is possible to assume different positions regarding “this same reality.” Moreover, the genuinely other views that Rancière is interested in highlighting are those that open up the field of experience to possibilities that assert the common power of bodies, an equality that cannot be specifically grounded. 17.  The English translation says “metapolitics.” The French says “meta-police,” so I am citing the French text. 18. Although Rancière writes this thinking mainly about Europe, especially France, these phenomena are also known in Colombia (see Rodríguez 2007; Gómez 2014). 19.  Brown has also discussed neoconservative trends in the United States, which both mobilize and enter into conflict with neoliberalism. In contrast, for Harvey, this form of conservatism can be seen as an inflexion of neoliberalism, different from the libertarian progressive one, but sharing its central political-economic assumptions. 20.  This image of the organic body has not ceased to haunt the Left. Not only has it been present in the utopian idea of communism as a community of equals that distribute goods equally among themselves but also in the Marxist idea of a nonconflictive association of producers and the bureaucratized forms of communism that sought to achieve a social body without fissures. Though they are three quite different registers of the communist idea, they share the idea of social formations (regarding these three registers, see Dardot and Laval 2014, 91). With respect to how the image of the body has haunted the Left, I particularly recall a speech by Hugo Chávez in which he insisted on an analogy between Venezuela and his sick body (see “Discurso completo de Hugo Chávez sobre su salud,” El mundo, July 2011, http://www.elmundo.es /america/2011/07/01/noticias/1309498083.html). 21. Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Danièle Lochak (1995), who signed a letter of protest against the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws, summarize the ethnic and racist spirit of those laws as follows: “Under the pretext of facilitating the surveillance of foreigners and repression against them, the law expands the power of the police in matters of identity control. This concerns us all. [. . .] Under the pretext of fighting “convenience marriages” the law allows mayors to resort to the Office of the Prosecutor General to verify the reality of general consent [. . .] under the pretext of deterring illegal foreigners from remaining, they are denied any type of

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social protection [. . .]. Under the pretext of “purifying” the access to citizenship the Méhaignerie law condemns young foreigners, who have often spent their entire lives in France, to the humiliation of explicitly claiming their citizenship” (retrieved from http://www.liberation.fr/tribune/1995/03/16/pour-un-debat-sur-le-sort-desetrangers _125236. Consulted on August 15, 2017). 22.  I am citing the French text, given that the English translation does not include this specific text. 23.  The English translation of the text (2009d, 72), which says “the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible,” was modified given that the original French says: “Le réel est toujours l’objet d’une fiction, c’est-à-dire d’une construction de l’espace où se nouent le visible, le dicible et le faisable.” 24.  For this reason, I also consider problematic those interpretations that blame what they call postmodernism for the inappropriately named post-truth. Moreover, the term postmodernism is equivocal, and is used loosely to refer to post-Nietzschean formulations that criticize universalism and truth as correspondence.

Part II

REINVENTIONS OF THE COMMON

The invention in the here and now of forms of the common as intervals-gaps (écarts) with respect to dominant forms continues to be at the core of emancipation practices and ideas. And emancipation, yesterday and today, is a way of living in the enemy’s world in the ambiguous position of those who fight the dominant order but are also able to construct spaces apart within it, where they escape its law. —Rancière, Dissenting Words, 50; my emphasis.

Chapter 4

Disagreement and the Division of the Social Body in Today’s World

Before continuing along our path, an additional methodological reminder is in order. After the diagnosis of our current situation, carried out in the previous chapter by putting Rancière’s reflections into dialogue with other voices, the reader should not now expect a series of proposals based on Rancière’s formulations, which would make it possible to decipher the paths that need to be taken in the present. A thought like Rancière’s cannot offer formulas or solutions regarding what we should do. In this respect, he differs from liberal political theorists and leftist intellectuals who, in response to consensualism, propose solutions such as deliberative democracy (Habermas 2001), radical-agonistic democracy (Mouffe 2000, 2013a, 2013b), progressive populism (Laclau 2005), or variations of one or the other, such as plebeian republicanism (Muraca and Rinesi 2010), to cite a few of the proposals that have had a greater or lesser influence in Europe and Latin America. Rancière does not conceive his reflections in terms of the production of a theory that offers a model of what politics is and should be, despite the fact that philosophers have read some of his texts of the 1990s, such as “Ten Theses on Politics” or Disagreement, in that manner. What he can offer are concepts, or, rather, “conceptualization processes” that make it possible to trace a conceptual landscape that displaces boundaries and think of other parameters (cf. ­Rancière 2012a, 148). In this sense, concepts like “distribution of the sensible,” “disagreement,” and “political subjectivization,” which will be central to this chapter, are far from being elements of a well-designed theoretical model to respond to reality, describe it adequately, or normatively regulate it. Neither are they, according to Rancière, a box of tools (theory, the book) that can be verified, used, or experienced by others (Deleuze and Foucault 1972; Rancière 2016c, 84). 117

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In this respect, let us recall Deleuze’s famous formulation during his dialogue with Foucault: A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. (Deleuze, in Deleuze and Foucault 1972)

Of course, Deleuze is not referring to the mechanical application of concepts to a given reality, but to the possibility of experimenting with those concepts and thereby producing effects that alter the real. The reason why Rancière is uncomfortable with the idea of “toolbox” is that, on the one hand, it might suggest a “functionalization of theoretical interventions with respect to action, as if they necessarily had to serve for action” (cf. Rancière 2016c, 85–86), and, on the other, because it might anticipate the effects concepts could have on the world. But concepts are more the markers of lines that join separate points and constitute a territory at the same time [. . .]. They are nouns that designate a mode of approach, a method, and that outline a terrain of thought and suggest ways of orienting ourselves on that terrain. (Rancière 2016c, 84)

That is to say that these constructions, rather than serving directly for concrete struggles, can map territories that open up the field of the possible, in the same way that those struggles do. Both concepts and emancipatory struggles are “displacement operators” that open up “a field of thought” (Rancière 2016c, 84). They are interventions that articulate, cross, and affect, so they should not be conceived in terms of unilateral influence on one another. They are connections that Rancière has proposed on the basis of the political scenes that have affected him: the proletarians of 1833 in Proletarian Nights, particularly Gauny and Jeanne Deroin; Blanqui and his idea of the proletariat as the part has no part; French demonstrations during the Algerian war, scenes that he insists on once and again as breaks in the thinkable and sayable that drove the development of his concepts. Other scenes that inspired him are the French labor unions’ claims in the 1990s and, more recently, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street, Puerta del Sol, and Nuit Debout demonstrations, which opened up new horizons and intervals in the present (Rancière 2016c, 147). The idea, for Rancière, is to establish connections among heterogeneous scenes (political statements, poems, historical narratives, gestualities, archival images, figures emerging from art works, moments of interruption created by popular power), as well as among political actors that carry out their



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struggles amidst the conflictive social world. These intersections can evince displacements that lead to thinking, perceiving, and, eventually, acting differently. However, neither the researcher nor the political actor is able to anticipate the alteration effect that those displacements can produce. For these reasons, Rancière refuses to anticipate the effect that his cartographies of the possible might have: he traces them in order to intervene “in what is given as the law of the world,” such as the law of consensus, and thus “replace the description of the world in terms of possibilities” (Rancière 2016c, 90). Nevertheless, this description does not aim at telling actors what they should do; “it just tells you: based on this, it’s up to you to work out what you want” (Rancière 2016c, 90). As he had suggested in The Intervals of Cinema, speaking of filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, “This is what I can do with the appearances available to me, the rest is up to you.” The researcher cannot provide tomorrows that are not already available in the presents of people and their daily experiences. Because these futures that drive desire already pass through the web of experiential relations and dissensual fractures of a context, it is not a matter of something merely intentional-subjective that actors pursue or of will. It is rather a question of being able to assert the desire of something different that is already present in more or less perceptible forms of reconfiguration of experience. Perhaps we could say Rancière’s work from the 1990s on is dedicated to the modest objective of mapping aesthetic and political scenes, scenes of thought, and scenes from the history of popular struggles that express a break in historical necessity, in the way it is and has to be, and that open up the field of the possible with its fractures and displacements. And it is precisely in this modesty that, in my view, we can find the potency and also the limitations of his thought. I speak of modesty and limitations because it is not a thought that provides answers that can be applied directly in order to counteract consensualism, or political-economic models that could replace it, mitigate its effects, or reorient them. But this is not because Rancière believes there is no alternative. It is because he thinks, above all, that providing a model or counter-model for the future would close off the horizon of the possible, thus blocking tomorrows that may already be opening up in the present (cf. ­Rancière 2017a, 60). Moreover, tracing such a counter-model would betray the method of equality and its assumptions, since it would mean that the theoretician has more clarity than ordinary people about the path that needs to be taken (cf. ­Rancière, in Deranty and Genel 2016, 155). There are, thus, no counter-models, but, rather, different alternatives that divide what is and open up the “unpredictability of futures,” and that need to be created by the actors themselves, in their forms of experience. It behooves a thinker like Rancière to tell people that this is possible; to say that people are already

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creating other practices, but that they do not often have weight or visibility not only because of the dominant governmental and economic forms but also due to theoretical-critical approaches that de-potentiate what people can do. I am convinced that this is precisely the power of Rancière’s approach: taking seriously the egalitarian assumption and incorporating it into his writing methodology, into how he writes and what he expects from that writing. As we have seen, starting with chapter 2, words have served many times to drive bodies to be able to do things differently. And I have the impression that Rancière seeks to produce those types of words in his books, thereby challenging theoretical visions that deny bodies the capacity to reinvent themselves and the common. Thus, Rancière’s distinction between police and politics, so often highlighted by commentators; the discussion of the notion of democracy; the challenging reflections on the critical dispositif; and his explorations of the aesthetic regime are aimed exactly at undoing modes of understanding that reduce the political, the forms of equality, and the agency of actors to certain regulatory frameworks and expected objectives that deny or inhibit what bodies can do, thus directly or indirectly converging with the law of consensus. Therefore, these distinctions do not function as operators that make it possible to say what is political and what cannot be; on the contrary, they are operators introduced in order to say: “let us not keep reducing the political to this,” because, if we do, we are completely losing sight of all the possibilities it opens up. At stake here is not the proposal of an anarchist, republican, autonomist, or populist model, in its possible combinations; neither is it a matter of a statecentered or anti-state (as Castro-Gómez, e.g., has argued [2015, 326–27]) thought, because the approaches that reduce the political to one of these options entail a police reduction of the social field and can close off what people can do on the basis of and beyond those models. What is really important is to know what people do with those models in order to assert their equality and whether that equality can be inscribed into institutions and practices. This is the case of the proletarians of Proletarian Nights, whose emancipatory paths Rancière followed. Though many of them belonged to the SaintSimonian movement, the issue was not to assess whether Saint-Simonianism was a project that made it possible to comply with x or y, and, much less, whether the proletarians were up to that type of project; what mattered was to follow what those bodies were able to do with the movement’s ideas and its utopian contents in order to open up new presents and different tomorrows, thus asserting the heterogeneity of the project. In any case, a key assumption of the method of equality is that “the magnitude of hope is defined by historical movements” (Rancière 2017a, 32).



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It is then essential to open up a space in which the ways of escaping, twisting, and fracturing the “conditions of use” of domination can be very diverse and also tense and conflictive. It is also crucial to recognize that it is never merely a question of specific manifestations, with their sudden and ephemeral episodes of glory, but of practices characterized by their experiential density. This density involves the fact that it is impossible to separate the means employed for intervention and the ends sought, the way of being and acting together in the present, and the objectives expected for the future (Rancière 2017a, 65). In consonance with this method of equality, I shall proceed as follows in this chapter: first, I will discuss Rancière’s notions of “disagreement” and “political subjectivization” and the diverse aspects they entail, in order to carry out a double movement of reflection. On the one hand, I expect to show how those notions make it possible to challenge understandings of the political that block unpredictable inscriptions of equality that can be invented by anybody whatsoever. On the other hand, I seek to make visible the openness and conflictive character of the social field and what bodies can do by counteracting the consensual closing off, flattening, and forms of dispossession analyzed in the previous chapter. Thus, through this double movement it is possible to intervene and, in the midst of consensus, carry out a counter-consensual dislocation, such as that proposed by Rancière, allowing for the disruption of the field of the thinkable and sayable. I am interested in putting this proposal into dialogue with current scenes that manifest forms of inscription of equality and reinvention of the common, which question consensus and some of its dynamics and thus fracture the field of the thinkable and sayable. To this effect, I shall use ethnographic approaches to some of these scenes, which assert the dissensual-experimental dimension of political actions and “their capacity to expand the horizon of the possible” (Fernández 2017, 219). In this manner, I hope to compose an argumentative web in which ­Rancière’s formulations appear as interventions that can collaborate with others (popular movements, ethnographic projects in association with the former) that are already occurring and reconfiguring experiences, thus counteracting the established logic of what is and can be. In proposing this intertwining, I also expect to show how political actors participate at the level of conceptual creation, from the standpoint of practices of “embodied, lived, and situated” knowledge (Casas-Cortés, Osterweill, and Powell 2008, 20), which allow them to orient themselves in their situations, argue for their interpretations of them, reconfigure the everyday webs of experience, and thus open up the controversy over the common.

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4.1. DISAGREEMENT The notion of “disagreement” clearly aims at describing a counter-consensual operation, but it also facilitates moving away from the logic that, according to Rancière, has prevailed in political philosophy and which he seeks to link to consensus. In fact, as he says in the preface to the book, published in the mid-1990s, his objective is to confront two phenomena that, paradoxically, converge: on the one hand, the idea of the alleged return of the autonomy of politics and of political philosophy with respect to the social and the economic, and the supposed defeat of Marxism (a position he associates with a French, republican appropriation of the thought of Hannah Arendt and Lévi Strauss); and, on the other, an evacuation of politics through consensus, which we commented in detail in the preceding chapter (Rancière 1999, viii). In view of this “curious convergence,” Rancière will put to the test the hypothesis that the alleged return of politics and of political philosophy aims at defining what the political is, its specific forms and operations, its rationality, as a gesture that is traditional of political philosophy: delimiting political capacities and political problems and the ways of dealing with them, and finding a foundation, an explanation, or an end in order to account for this. But Rancière’s point is that this intention actually suppresses the rationality of disagreement, in the particular sense he gives to this term. In fact, the term does not merely indicate a divergence of opinions due to ignorance or misunderstanding but also refers to the discussion of what “speaking,” “arguing,” “speaker” mean, in a given speech situation. By stating that there are speakers, arguments, and situations that can count as politically rational, political philosophy would try to put an end to the discussion about these terms, and, therefore, expels disagreement from itself. However, There are always [established forms of] community among bodies: those corresponding to the sovereign body, to human and divine filiations, to the place in the system of economic and social distributions [. . .]. Politics comes later, as the invention of a form of community that suspends the evidence of the others and institutes unprecedented relations between meanings and bodies and their modes of identification, places, and functions. (Rancière 2009a, 315)

The rationality of disagreement consists precisely in questioning a certain distribution: it means opening up the discussion on what counts as a part, subject, problem, and on the boundaries of a political community. It also involves starting a debate regarding a way of counting and a count that asserts certain forms of distribution of bodies on the basis of certain forms of identification of what those bodies can do. Therefore, disagreement is not merely a relation established among a given set of persons who disagree with



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respect to a certain object; rather, the notion (mésentente) “plays on the relation” (Rancière 2016a, 83) among entendre, to hear; entendre, to understand; and s’ entendre, to understand one another. This “polemical knot between the different senses of the word ‘to understand’ ” (Rancière 2016c, 83) indicates that in certain discussions on the meaning of certain terms, agreement and acceptance are broken, more exactly, in discussions in which a gap-interval (écart) is produced between understanding the meaning of a term and its interunderstanding and acceptance. In sum, these are discussions that question and make visible the manner in which those meanings depend on certain parameters of sense and perception that make it possible to see, hear, perceive, and understand certain things, invisibilizing and making meaningless other things that could at some point break the acceptance of that framework. This is why Rancière believes that the notion of disagreement “sums up the sensible and conflictual dimension of the political community” (Rancière 2016c, 83), that is, the manner in which the latter always involves boundaries of sense and perception that are also modes of identification and frontiers of inclusion-exclusion. This polemic division of political concepts cuts across and fosters the conflictive dimension of social formations. In the case of current-day Colombia, it is something that became more evident in the recent and critical debates over the peace process with the insurgencies (particularly the FARC) and, more generally, over peacebuilding. All of a sudden it became evident that “peace” is a polemic signifier that presupposes very different understandings of the common and of democracy (Quintana 2016c).1 On the one hand, we have a reductive position that understands the conflicts that have affected the Colombian territory in terms of a conflict between a legitimate state and a criminal organization, and peace as the neutralization of all forms of violence, except the “legitimate” violence of the state, which threaten the security, order, stability, and productivity of society. On the other hand, we find a more complex conception of peace that we could call “juridical-social,” which, despite acknowledging that peacebuilding must include and bring about structural reforms of society, reduces the conflict to the mere institutional weakness—police and humanitarian—of the state (Quintana 2016c, 221–22). Finally, we have a notion emerging from egalitarian popular movements, known as “transformative peace,”2 This notion affirms that the country’s political-social violence has not been only due to a weak social state under the rule of law but also with mechanisms of marginalization that have prevented communities from establishing practices and modes of relation that allow them to resolve their problems collectively and locally. This third perspective thus opens up disagreement regarding political subjects, the political capacity of subjects, vis-à-vis the logic of experts prevailing in consensual orders.

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This last point is crucial for Rancière: disagreement regarding dominant meanings and practices makes it possible for some social actors to refuse to be identified as a certain type of subjects, in order to make themselves be perceived, seen, heard, felt otherwise and, in this controversy, manifest problems and arguments that were not heard or perceived and did not even make sense in the situation established for public discussion. And in this discussion of the distribution of the sensible, they can manifest their equality. This crucial point we had briefly touched upon in chapter 1 can now become clearer. Questioning a given distribution of the sensible, disassembling the way it is assembled, allows for the manifestation of equality because it evinces the manner in which that distribution fixes bodies to certain capacities and functions, while denying them others through which they would be able to intervene in the common and reconfigure it, thus asserting themselves in a manner that made no sense within the established framework. According to Rancière, political conflicts, viewed from the history of moments of equality, have to do above all with questioning an established situation for intervention, participation, political deliberation, and the discussion of the terms, boundaries, and rules of the setting of interlocution. This is also why Rancière believes that the fundamental political conflict is the discussion regarding who can intervene in politics, who has the right to speak and decide about “the common,” and the manner in which that disputed common world is to be understood. This is of utmost relevance in the era of the society of experts, in which the latter, in the name of a specific economicsocial knowledge, take on the right of deciding what is best for the “common” well-being. Thus, on the basis of the above, it is possible to understand why the rationality of politics always comes after, disassembling and reconfiguring that which has been defined by an established rationality. In particular, disagreement accounts for the indeterminate character of equality and of the common—­for the manner in which equality can manifest itself in unpredictable forms and figures that are able to reconfigure the commonality of a space of sense and perception. But this is precisely the conflict and openness of the field of experience that consensus seeks to suppress, and that political philosophy can suppress when it seeks to define, even today, what politics and its procedures are or should be. That which is thus concealed is precisely the wrong (tort) that causes disagreement to emerge: For political philosophy to exist, the order of political idealities must be linked to some construction [composition] of city “parts”; to a count [compte] whose complexities may mask a fundamental miscount, a miscount [mécompte] that may well be the blaberon, the very wrong that is the stuff of politics. (Rancière 1999, 6)



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Let us examine this in greater detail. 4.1.1.  The Inevitable Miscount Rancière’s entire polemic with Western political philosophy, from its Greek origins (Plato and Aristotle) to its modern and contemporary versions, has to do with the way it, through multiple paths, has tended to “resolve” the problems of justice, equality, freedom, and community on the basis of a police understanding of those terms that no longer give rise to conflict. Let us recall that police logic is conjunctive and seeks correspondence among bodies, ways of doing and feeling, and statements. A police conception of justice would then be the correct distribution of the common, according to certain previously established criteria of formal or material equality, which ensure a cohesive, well-integrated, more or less harmonious community. Rancière’s point is that political philosophy has been interested not only in establishing that “just” distribution of the common but also in justifying it as the normative, regulative framework capable of resolving potential conflicts. Thus, the problem is not the police understandings of these terms; they necessarily have to exist since we are part of assemblages of sense that order and distribute. The problem is seeking to legitimize a certain distribution as universally valid and normative, and thus claiming to resolve, organize, or identify the conflicts that might emerge. The problem is that these perspectives aim at closing the gap-interval (l’ écart) between the understanding of these terms and the interunderstanding of their meaning, between what is said about them and accepting them as valid. This can be observed especially when the criteria of equality, justice, freedom, respect, and the capacity of acting according to them are tied to a certain normative understanding of human beings, of what nature or the human person should be. Thus operates the prior delimitation of a way of life (of nonnecessity, noncoercion, nonviolence, and rationality) that is assumed as typical of political existence (cf. Rancière 1998, 167). The quote from Aristotle that appears at the beginning of chapter 1 of Disagreement is worth recalling here: Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also and used by them to express pain or pleasure; for their nature does indeed enable them not only to feel pleasure and pain but to communicate these feelings to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, the just and the unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state. (Politics, 1, 1253a 9–17)

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Political capacity and its ends are here defined on the basis of an understanding of human beings as “logical animals,” that is to say from a prior division considered to be evident, but is not, between the properly human and the merely animal, between bíos and zoé. It is a distinction drawn between possession (hexis) of logos and the utterance of phoné, voice. It thus differentiates the word that expresses and can discern what is useful and what is harmful, and, inferentially, what is just and unjust, good or evil for the human being and for a community bent on its realization (an inference challenged, of course, by Rancière), from the capacity to merely indicate pain or pleasure, which the human being shares with other animals. Now then, Rancière’s whole point is that there is no continuity or derivation between “the useful” and “the just”: neither on the basis of the common good given for humans, nor along the utilitarian path of common usefulness, nor through the intermediate route of subsumption, through deliberation, of the particularities of individuals into the universality of the state. Continuity can only be traced when it is assumed that there is something intrinsically useful for human beings in general, which can be projected to the political community (cf. ­Rancière 1999, 21–22). This would be possible through an understanding of the properly human, identified as the possession (hexis) of logos, of the capacity for deliberation, and not merely through the mere understanding of language (esthesis), such as that which allegedly only slaves, children, plebeians (in the Roman world), women, blacks, indigenous peoples, or racialized subjects have (until very recently, and maybe even today). What is thus concealed is the conflict that may arise between the useful for a certain community of life and the way of assuming it and the just, that which is considered valuable, acceptable “in general,” as well as the conflict that may arise between the properly human (bearer of logos) and the defectively human (merely capable of esthesis). This concealed double conflict is the wrong (tort) or miscount that necessarily cuts across every political community: the manner in which it necessarily miscounts those that it only understands defectively, as capable of understanding without logos, or as ignorant, incapable, marginalized, which it invisibilizes and “fails to see well.”3 In any case, the necessary miscount is due to the fact that “there are always too many words and too many available meanings of words, which makes it impossible for the states of bodies and the states of meaning to coincide without any excess” (Rancière 2009a, 319). Therefore, in every distribution of sense and perception there will always be an excess that is not counted or is miscounted. Consequently, what traditional political philosophy and consensualism conceal is the production of that miscounted part, insofar as it is made invisible, but most of all, insofar as it is counted as a bad part, a part that must be led, governed, assisted, gradually integrated, to use most recent language of consensualism.



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Moreover, in view of the above, one could say that wrong—immemorial though “always current”—has to do with the manner in which the social order is always symbolized by “dooming the majority of speaking beings to the night of silence or to the animal noise of voices expressing pleasure or pain” (Rancière 1999, 22). Therefore, invisibilizing wrong entails concealing that doom and justifying it as that which is and should be. This can be stated in various forms: In the old forthright tone of the Ancients that persists among “liberals” of the nineteenth century, it goes like this: there are only chiefs and indians [sic], those of substance and those of no account, elites and unwashed masses, experts and ignorant fools. In contemporary euphemism, the proposition is put differently: there are only parts of society-social majorities and minorities, socioprofessional categories, interest groups, communities, and so on. There are only parts that must be converted into partners. (Rancière 1999, 14)

In concealing the wrong, something else is also concealed: the possibility that the part that has no part and cannot be counted according to those schemes could emerge and assert itself as a miscounted or uncounted part. What is covered up is a sort of tear (déchirure) that cuts across every political community and its distributions, criteria, and forms of counting and doing justice, as well as the possibility of “antagonism between parts of the community that are not real parts of the social body” (Rancière 1999, 21). Consensus aims at closing off that antagonism, since, as we already know, its saturated adjustment prevents the appearance of the part that does not let itself be counted in the given partitions (cf. Rancière 2001, 251). 4.1.2.  The Manifestation of the Wrong At the heart of politics lies a double wrong, a fundamental conflict, never conducted as such, over the relationship between the capacity of the speaking being who is without qualification and political capacity. (Rancière 1999, 22)

As we said, every social order involves a way of counting and, more exactly, certain criteria that disregard the equal capacity to express themselves of those who are miscounted. Those criteria lose sight of the fact that the “miscounted” might count in a different manner, in ways unpredictable by the count or established manner of counting. These criteria, then, reinforce the wrong. In fact, logos “is never simply speech,” or the capacity for argumentation and deliberation, but rather, that which is counted, that which is asserted as word, argumentation, and deliberation: “the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech,

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capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some other emission is merely perceived as a noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt” (Rancière 1999, 22–23). We can also conclude from the above that wrong is not merely pain or suffering as a datum, as something given. When people act politically, they are not merely reacting to a given suffering; they are interpreting it as a certain type of suffering, as an injustice that is not evident within the given framework. In this sense, and this is a fundamental point, wrong, in its materiality, is always also a symbolic wrong: not merely because all economic oppression is at the same time cultural oppression (as Bourdieu had already rightly shown) but also because emancipatory subjects that struggle against economic oppression have to begin by questioning the manner in which they are fixed symbolically as a certain type of subjects. Thus, their manifestations break with the logic of the reproduction of suffering (Bourdieu), by fracturing the language established to speak about social suffering and the suffering of individuals (Rancière, in Deranty and Genel 2016, 127). From the workers’ archives, Rancière learned that those proletarians had to “invent a new kind of suffering,” the suffering linked to the “denial of certain capacities” (Rancière, in Deranty and Genel 2016, 126), the symbolic suffering related to the partition of positions in society, to the way people are counted. Many peasant, indigenous, and Afro-descendant movements in Colombia also illustrate this need to challenge certain socioeconomic forms of intervention, and question, first of all, the cultural (symbolic) understandings at stake in those forms of intervention (the understandings of local actors, the territory, life, the economy, property).4 The wrong, then, is not merely given within the parameters of an established social or juridical order, because the wrong is not the unjust or miscounted within that order, but rather what that order itself miscounts. And the manner in which an order miscounts cannot be determined and demonstrated within that order itself or merely outside it. The miscount produced by an order of justice can only be demonstrated by challenging that order, making use of some of its elements but turning them around, torsioning them. This involves splitting that justice and, with it, the political community as a “well” assembled body, through a scenario that was not given and needs to be constructed. This is what Rancière argues regarding the scene of plebeian secession on Mount Aventine (287 B.C.), according to his reading of ­Ballanche’s narrative:5 The order that structures patrician domination recognizes no logos capable of being articulated by beings deprived of logos, no speech capable of being proffered by nameless beings, beings of no ad count. /Faced with this, what do the plebs gathered on the Aventine do? They do not set up a fortified camp in the



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manner of the Scythian slaves. They do what would have been unthinkable for the latter: they establish another order, another partition of the perceptible [. . .]. In a word, they conduct themselves like beings with names. Through transgression, they find that they too, just like speaking beings, are endowed with speech that does not simply express want, suffering, or rage, but intelligence. (Rancière 1999, 24–25)

In order for the miscount to reveal itself as such, a symbolic reconfiguration in the given distribution of the sensible is needed, which would evince its partitions. The communal body, conceived as an organic body, organized into parts to which certain functions correspond, is disassembled in order to give way to another assemblage. The plebeians thus name themselves as the part that has no part and must, therefore, find a different place that pierces the established places and counts, thus challenging the validity of the given distribution. What the plebeians do on the Aventine is precisely to transgress the order of the city that has assigned them to the mere hexis of logos, in order to show that they possess logos. This reconfiguration does not mean that the plebeians simply exceed the given order of sense completely; neither does it mean that they adapt to the established logos. Rather, they disrupt what that logos counts as capable of logos, as possessing a name, visibility, and political capacity, and reveal themselves as bodies that not only react to necessity, but that from that necessity are capable of articulating words, of providing reasons to challenge a situation, instead of just complaining about their sufferings. They emancipate themselves. This entails torsioning the distribution of the sensible for which the expression of political freedom involves liberation from material needs, and, through those torsions, giving rise to another distribution, in which bodies doomed to material needs and to survival (at the level of what the Greeks called zoé) can also deliberate, participate in decisions that concern the common (at the level of what Aristotle called bíos), and argue for their reasons. However, to emphasize that this is basically a dispute over the word does not mean to affirm that the field of the political is that of articulate language and deliberation, as the logocentric tradition (from Aristotle to Habermas) has affirmed. The reasons why this is not so are, first, that there is no specific terrain of the political, nor are there specific political things and criteria; but, above all, because, in my view, if Rancière insists that the fundamental conflict is the discussion over who can speak politically and everything this entails, it is because the distributions of sense are partitions that trace boundaries among logos, truth, meaning, and what is evident in opposition to the voice, the irrational, the meaningless, the unthinkable, and the unsayable. Political expression has, therefore, to confront those boundaries while making use of them to evince their contradictions, the gaps that cut across

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them, and the manner in which those gaps can be appropriated to undo those boundaries. The idea is to demonstrate that there is logos in the voice, truth in fiction, meaning in the meaningless, and that those that are seen only as bodies are also speaking bodies, bodies that can give reasons regarding the disputed common. This is precisely how crossings and interstices are produced, which reconfigure the distribution of the sensible (Quintana 2016a, 15). And, “in these crossings, nothing has the same value it once had, nothing can be counted as it was once counted, neither the voice, nor logos, nor meaning, nor fiction,” nor bodies, nor the reasons given (Quintana 2016a, 15). 4.1.3.  Political Conflict Politics is an extreme form of symbolic violence, an inescapable conflict over principles that allows violence to be controlled. Because it is a regulated symbolic violence,6 and because it institutionalizes a wrong and an alterity that can be discussed, politics is a substitute for war. And in the absence of politics, we do indeed see the reappearance of figures of an alterity that cannot be symbolized, and the reappearance of war to the death or generalized criminality. (Rancière 1997, 35)

These words situate political conflict in a perspective that is largely absent from Rancière’s reflections, namely, the question of violence, and provides other elements that, as I shall argue below, make it possible to suggest some lines of reflection regarding the problematic issues posed in chapter 3. First of all, it is essential not to read the text on the basis of firmly established partitions between violence and nonviolence, institution and violence, discourse and violence. On the one hand, Rancière is not saying that political conflict is nonviolent since it occurs through language, institutions, rules of the game, and established procedures that would, at most, give rise to symbolic violence. Much less is he referring to symbolic violence in Bourdieu’s sense, as ideological adherences naturalized by the dominated (cf. Bourdieu 1999, 224–25). To think that way would entail a police comprehension of politics (that establishes beforehand the territories in which the latter moves). Moreover, it would neutralize political conflict. However, Rancière does suggest that political conflict is not just war or war-related conflict. In tracing that contrast, he certainly does not lose sight of the fact that wars also have to do with institutions and the discourses that ground and sometimes even justify and legitimize them, or that political conflict can also generate forms of violence (blockades, clash of bodies, unauthorized occupation of spaces). But these are symbolic violences, and not because they are merely interpretive, taking that “merely” to refer to something not too material. They are symbolic because they aim at tearing



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apart and reconfiguring a framework of sense, and this is, as I have underlined since chapter 2, something very material that affects bodies, their relations, and the affects circulating among them, as well as organization at the institutional level. In wars, on the other hand, one part seeks to destroy the other, without creating intervals between the two worlds that simply clash. Moreover, a political dispute weaves other forms of relation among bodies, which alter the actors and their ways of being with one another. In contrast, a war confrontation produces a clash of identities that destroys bodies, rules out any form of relation, and denies reciprocal interaction and alteration, thus reaffirming identities.7 To say it in other words, war bodies are trapped in the identities they have been assigned and are thus forced to wage their life and death battles in that war of identity, driven by the assertion of themselves through hatred, destruction, or subjugation of the other. This is highlighted in the passage of Disagreement on the Scythian slaves (cf. Rancière 1999, 13). What these “dominated” lack is not the logos of political existence; to say this would mean to reiterate the gesture of traditional political philosophy. What they have not yet done is to confront the forms of domination that produce them as slaves endowed merely with a voice; they still need to divide themselves: divide their bodies from the representations in which they have been subjected; divide the community that has assigned them to the sphere of subjugated serfdom and repetition of labor; show that their equality is not just equality in war but also equal capacity to mobilize their bodies in a direction other than the one imposed on them. But what they lack is not due to a naturalized incapacity but due to extremely saturated, not very heterogeneous forms of domination that allow little room for the production of gaps-intervals. On the other hand, as we shall see later, political arguments are not limited to a mere discursive exchange among constituted interlocutors regarding established objects, on the basis of a Habermasian style of logic; rather, they “are at the same time a way of reshaping the relationship between speech and its account as well as the perceptible configuration that demarcates the domains and powers of the logos and the phôné, the spaces of the visible and the invisible” (Rancière 1999, 40). These arguments stage a conflict and make visible or heard objects, subjects, and words that did not exist, in which the latter create themselves as objects, subjects, and words that can make themselves visible and audible thanks to the displacement of certain forms of speech and the use of heterogeneous language games mobilized by bodies. These arguments can also be made through apparently mute gestures that are inseparable from actions (such as Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to give up her seat in the context of segregation in Montgomery, Alabama).8 These are actions aimed at constructing meaning, a space of intelligibility, and which, therefore, seek to be recognized as meaningful expressions, despite their

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occurrence as confrontational words and gestures, which embrace impropriety and the contingency of sense. They are, likewise, actions that implicate bodies capable of altering themselves, of moving differently, of interrupting their assigned functions (congregating in squares, making a different use of them, gathering in assemblies, marching, occupying work spaces); voices that become logos without ceasing to be voices; bodies that become speaking bodies in the materiality of bodies; bodies experiment with gestures that allow them to express themselves differently. In this sense, the issue is not to defend—as Arendt (1970) does, for example—­the “purity of action,” because, to begin with, the very force with which political demonstrations often appear could already be considered a form of violence: violence of gestures or of indignant voices, violence of mechanisms of pressure and allowing to do, violence of the clash of forces, which is why it is described as a certain type of symbolic violence. It is more a matter of emphasizing that there is a series of conflicts that should not be reduced to mere destructive violence, as some institutional and deliberative stances believe, despite the fact that they disrupt normative orders, do not move in a given space of interlocution, and even appeal, in many cases, to the use of a certain force or coercion. A couple of current examples illustrate better the complexity at stake here.9 Undoubtedly, the forms of protest of the sans-papiers in France, who make visible their condition of exclusion and invisibilization by forming associations that reconfigure language in order to speak of their situation in terms of arbitrariness (calling themselves sans-papiers questions the terms “illegal” and “clandestine”), are different from the revolts characterized by rage and resentment that took place in French banlieues in 2005 and caused considerable material damages in Paris. However, the latter should not be considered as mere acts of vandalism and criminality, given that, in their violence, they challenge the city and the systemic violences produced by the social order, to which those who desperately reject their economic and political marginalization are exposed.10 In a certain sense, stigmatizing those expressions of rage as mere criminal outbursts would be to reiterate and contribute to the same gesture of exclusion and marginalization by the state mechanisms that have produced those zones of exclusion (see ­Merklen 2012). However, one could ask whether these politically significant expressions, to the extent that they make visible certain problems linked to the established boundaries of that assumed as “common,” manage to create intervals capable of twisting around hatred and resentment in order to produce alterations in the bodies, manifested in their ways of relating to ­others and in the institutions they attack. One could also ask whether by not twisting around some of the reactions, which is what allows for their criminalization, these manifestations contribute to the continued operation of



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those excluding institutions, without visibilizing the perhaps unprecedented claims and demands that might be at stake. Bearing this in mind, Rancière is then able to highlight—at the end of the text cited at the beginning of this section—that when political conflict is not staged, we see “the reappearance of figures of an alterity that cannot be symbolized, and the reappearance of war to the death or generalized criminality” (Rancière 1997, 35). This is what seems to be happening in current consensual orders that have closed off spaces and dismantled the forms in which conflicts might express themselves through the creation of gaps-intervals of disagreement. And the destruction of these political spaces triggers violence, instead of torsioning it, thus giving rise to intractable alterities that nurture their hatred and resentment:11 The excluded are rejected, pushed away toward identitarian subjectivations of a religious type, and toward criminal and warlike forms of action. What we have to combat here is this hateful drift toward identitarianism. [. . .] We have to take seriously the fact that part of the population is in a state of virtual dissidence, liable to transforming them into combatants. This implies challenging the discourses and the procedures that have engendered hatred; seriously fighting unemployment and inequalities and discrimination of all kinds; and rethinking the ways in which people who do not live and think the same way can live together. That’s a difficult task for everyone. [. . .] But here there is a farreaching piece of work, incumbent on everyone. The populations that identify as Muslim also have to say how they want to live with others, how they want to make up part of the world, and invent forms of political participation. [. . .] That is something that goes beyond the idea of integration—an idea that itself still belongs to the logic of segregation. (Rancière 2016d; my emphasis)

Therefore, the way in which these forms of violence can be countered is not, as many liberal commentators think, education in liberal tolerance of Muslim groups, their integration into republican values, or assistance-oriented approaches that simply remove from marginality those young people susceptible of falling into extremism. In fact, these consensual mechanisms reinforce the divisions between those who are inside and those who are outside, ready to be integrated, and reproduce forms of inequality and segregation that keep breeding unrest, hatred, and resentment. It is necessary for the heterogeneous and conflictive Muslim communities to be able to process their disagreement through forms of intervention that allow them to stage their problems and their proposals to solve them. And this might involve, going beyond Rancière and thinking with Bonaventura de Sousa (1997), the creation of intersections among elements of Muslim tradition, which facilitate piercing Western certainties, while also allowing for the construction of some sort of relation with them, that is, twisting them around. It is a matter of forms

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of collective reelaboration that do not have to deny cultural singularity, but that aim at making possible reinventions of the common between Muslims and non-Muslims. Because, identity is first about fear: the fear of the other, the fear of nothing, which finds on the body of the other its object. And the polemical culture of emancipation, the heterological enactment of the other, was also a way of civilizing [civiliser]12 that fear. (Rancière 1992, 64)

In any case, beyond these problems that particularly affect France, Europe, and the United States, the passage cited is also interesting because it suggests something I have been interested in pursuing in this book, namely, the manner in which certain forms of identification produce immunitarian, destructive effects (such as hatred and resentment), which cannot be “eliminated,” but can be torsioned and altered through other practices and political spaces or, in Rancière’s terms, through subjectivization processes. Such processes make it possible to stage and reelaborate social conflicts, thus countering the violence they might unleash. As I suggested in the Introduction, this is of special interest for Latin America, particularly for Colombia, where the forms of violence and historical limitation of spaces for political dissensus, and not just the recent forms of consensualism, have exacerbated fears, hatred, and resentment. In my experience with some social movements in Colombia, I have observed that these immunitarian affects can be torsioned by collective forms of action and organization, through which the negation of the other, who is blamed, can be channeled into forms of indignation and solidarity that make it possible to reexperience the world as a common space.

4.1.4. Subjectivization What is a process of subjectivization? It is the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other. (Ranciére 1992, 60)

Political subjects have to create themselves as such, in forms of alteration that affect vital spaces. As suggested in chapters 1 and 2, these processes arise from an experiential density, from forms of relation that create mismatches in given social assemblages, and affect a social fabric. These alterations show “a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience” (Rancière 1999, 35). This reconfigures the manner in which the word counts, as a word that asserts itself, thus challenging the regime of visibility in which it did not count.



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Let us dwell on the first part of the formulation. That the emancipatory political subject institutes an unprecedented form of enunciation emphasizes the fact that it emerges as a speech event (événement de parole), in mottoes, in rules which that “we” eventually give themselves, in decision-making and self-government institutions that they create.13 But, at the same time, that “we” demands acknowledgment of the capacity to decide on the common that it grants to itself and demonstrates by instituting itself as a political subject. In other words, in constituting itself as subject, it enacts the very capacity it claims as the capacity of anyone, which is wronged by the existing distributions. In this sense, the political subject is a process that gradually configures itself in formulations, practices, gestures, and institutions through which it questions incapacitating formulations about certain social actors (peasants, black and indigenous populations, women, wage earners, peasant women, etc.), about their problems, and about ways of handling them, which reiterate the incapacity being challenged by that political subject. At stake in an emancipatory movement is, then, the alteration of a given embodied cultural or social identity (e.g., that of the peasant as a subject that merely farms and is thrown into necessity), which makes it possible to demonstrate a wrong. But here it is crucial to configure an impossible identification (cf. Rancière 1992, 62ff.; 1999, 87), or, in the terms set forth above, a nous-autres (we-others) that is unidentifiable in a given distribution, which thus requires the reconfiguration of that distribution. Moreover, by naming itself, that subject calls for that reconfiguration and manifests the wrong done to equality by a certain order of things. For this reason, the process of subjectivization is already the demonstration of wrong and therefore always involves the relation with another, that is, a heterological logic: First, [because] it is never the simple assertion of an identity; it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy [. . .]. Second, it is a demonstration, and a demonstration always supposes an other, even if that other refuses evidence or argument [. . .]. Third, the logic of subjectivization always entails an impossible identification. (Rancière 1992, 62)

This heterological logic is quite different from a politics of identity that understands the actions of popular movements in terms of the production of new identitarian discourses aimed at achieving more rights for those identities (Chaves 2001). It also distances itself from “culturalist” approaches that attach beforehand these manifestations to a determined social identity that would express the culture of some group or subgroup (Rancière 1994, 97). This is so because the idea of subjectivization suggests that emancipatory political action always involves the alteration of given identities and not just

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their mere expression. And it also shows that the emergence of new political actors, capable of doing what is not expected of them, is linked to the possibility of confronting (dividing, challenging) a communal form of life and its identitarian distributions. Likewise, this idea of subjectivization is not a logic of recognition à la Honneth, according to which social actors seek their recognition by others through their political actions, in order to assert a sense of “self-esteem,” “self-confidence,” and “self-respect” that also allows for analogous relations within the community (Rancière, in Deranty and Genel 2016, 86). In fact, such view reproduces a comprehension of the subject and the community as a “person,” that is, as an autonomous, sovereign, responsible subject, capable of answering for itself and its acts. This is a normative understanding of what the human being ought to be, which makes it possible to derive what the community and the relations among subjects ought to be, and which, once again, conceals the fact that every normative order produces a distribution of sense and perception that can damage equality and that needs to be challenged by those who are miscounted.14 For this reason, according to Rancière, “the subject in general has to be thought not simply as a self-related identity” but as a process of creation and experimentation: “Subjectivity is a matter of operations, and those operations are alterations” (89). Also because of this, the struggle of political subjects is about another recognition, with respect to the one established by certain assignments of identity (91); it is a struggle that makes it possible to assert a common power of bodies through unforeseeable paths of experimentation. Before moving on, let us reflect for a moment on how the issue of subjectivization relates to and modifies the question of identity, a complex matter when one thinks of popular movements, particularly in Latin America. Above all, one would have to bear in mind that for Rancière, political subjectivization is not a mere process of disidentification that rejects all identity, although the author insists that “the respect of an identity may in fact signify a statement of incapacity” (Deranty and Genel 2016, 91). Subjectivization entails a process of not only disidentification with respect to established identities but also naming and identifying oneself, though that naming is always a misnomer, an impossible identification. These misnomers do not have to necessarily presuppose the paradoxical juxtaposition of established identifications, which perforate an established “we” in order to give rise to another, although it is true that Rancière does privilege these cases in his examples, particularly the two forms of enunciation recurrently cited in his works: “We [the French] are also German Jews,” used in May 1968, or “We [the French] are the wretched of the earth,” which appeared during the demonstrations against the war in Algeria. These contradictory performatives can also occur in utterances that link a given “we” to an inexistent one that is appealed to



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as if it existed, as in the case of illegal immigrants in the United States who rally around the proclamation “We are Americans”; or of designations that indicate “the simple contingency of being there together, with no other principle of distribution than that of [. . .] the equality of anyone with everyone” (Rancière 1998, 160), presented as a principle wronged by the current forms of domination (as in the more recent utterances: “We, the indignant” or “We are the 99% . . .,” etc.). These forms of disidentification that open up gaps in identities can also occur in long-lasting political processes, which, paradoxically, seem to vindicate a strong idea of identity. I consider this point to be crucial: challenging certain forms of identity does not imply losing sight of the fact that political subjectivization also entails the reconfiguration of an identity, albeit one that manages to twist around the established consensual identifications, at times even using them in order to open up gaps and intervals in them. This can be observed in the manner in which protracted political processes affirm and recognize themselves in Colombia, for example, the CRIC (Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca) and the PCN (Black Communities Process). In the case of the former, the claim of cultural singularity is very clear: Since its inception, it has been fundamental for the CRIC to affirm our claims vis-à-vis the prevailing rule of law. Of course, the violation of indigenous rights has been a constant, from the Spanish invasion until today. For this reason, it has been essential for us to compile all the legislation related to us, in order to familiarize ourselves with it, defend it, and make our rights be respected. (CRIC 2013)

Undoubtedly, these claims can be framed in the Colombian Constitution of 1991, which defined the country as a multiethnic and multicultural nation. This definition fragmented communities into population groups strongly identified racially and ethnically, which—given the situation of violence in Colombia—could be governed according to integration, assistance, and humanitarian victimization programs (Jaramillo 2014, 17). Nevertheless, indigenous movements in Colombia have shown that this ethnic language can also be a path to “build alternative political notions” (Jaramillo 2014, 231), as can be observed in the above-cited words of the indigenous communities of Cauca, which speak of rights they consider to be their own and which arise in popular processes of political participation. These rights do not have to be understood simply as the requirement to preserve an original cultural identity, nor as a strategic use of identity, that is, as a nonessentialist resource that is inevitable in the practice of trying to articulate collective demands.15 Rather, one could conceive that identity as the expression of a claim of historical singularity that manifests the recognition of shared practices, complex relation networks, forms of domination, and violence.

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The affirmation of that historical singularity would not then entail an essentialist vindication, but rather an acknowledgment of the fact that what we call “identity” always emerges in heterogeneous, historically configured networks, practices, institutions, and discourses, in the midst of which it is possible for reappropriations that substantially reconfigure forms of identification to occur. The organization of indigenous communities in an “ethnic” process, such as the CRIC, has clearly modified vital practices and forms of agency in those territories, as attested to in their discursive productions available on the web, as well as in direct dialogue with members of organizations that are part of this process. Neither is this a merely strategic ethnic ­vindication—as if it were a mask put on in order to achieve certain things despite not really believing in it—but a vindication that makes it possible to recognize and affirm a history that cuts across bodies and constitutes them. Thus, what might be at stake in these identitarian appropriations is a task of experimentation that allows for political displacements, disidentifications, rearticulations, and reconfigurations capable of countering forms of regulation on the basis of ethnicization, by creating gaps in those very forms of ethnic assignment. Pablo Jaramillo has addressed this issue in a detailed, ethnographic-collaborative study of the Wayúu Women’s Force process: The recent changes in the Wayúu Women’s Force evince concepts that make it possible to be Wayúu, beyond defining the Wayúu as a liberal subject of reparation. [. . .] These horizons and possibilities are framed within a great capacity for cultural experimentation [. . .]. By cultural experimentation, I understand an exercise of dialogue at the borders, in order to transform the nature of those entities that come into contact. [. . .] In this sense, I always identified at the center of the “Force” the intention of facing change, not through adoption/subjugation, but by asking an important question regarding what it means to be and come to be Wayúu. (Jaramillo 2014, 237–40)

Alterations are produced in the liberal subject that seeks identity as selfsameness of the subject responsible for itself and in the historical identifications produced in a territory. These alterations give rise to questions regarding the being and coming to be of an identity and that open up the possibility of fracturing those identifications through intervals in which the name of an unprecedented “we” accounts for those displacements. In this sense, a subjectivization process “does not create subjects ex nihilo,” but creates gaps-intervals in existing identities: “workers,” “women,” “peasants,” “Afrodescendants,” and “Wayúu” are “identities that apparently hold no mystery” (see Rancière 1999, 36). However, political subjectivization challenges this evidence by contrasting the definition of a “who” with the assignment of certain capacities and incapacities, and by questioning the distribution that makes those assignments possible. For this reason, according to Rancière, all



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political subjectivization is, above all, the “manifestation of a gap (écart)” (see Rancière 1999, 36). Such a gap was created by the name “Wayúu Women’s Force,” whose practices posed questions about gender relations and their distributions, about agency from the perspective of victimization (against some paralyzing and depoliticizing understandings of victimized bodies), and about what Wayúu territory and sovereignty mean. These questions entailed other forms of thinking being-with-others and imagining possible futures in common (Jaramillo 2014, 240–41). In his work on the Black Communities Process (PCN), Arturo Escobar has also shown that this organization, which conceives itself exactly as a process, arises in the interval between an understanding of identity anchored in “traditional practices and ancestral forms of knowledge” and the idea of a “project of political and cultural construction,” exposed to change (Escobar 2014, 226). In this way, the PCN develops a fluid understanding of identity that destabilizes the “static, fixed, and conventional” notion of neoliberal multiculturalism (Escobar 2014, 226). In fact, the very name of the collective accounts for this fluid understanding in the process of forming the political “we,” and the manner in which the latter is the “product of an intense assemblage of practices developed around local disputes” (Escobar 2014, 225). These disputes have to do, once again, with the defense of territory, with struggles over environmental resources against predatory interventions, such as the extensive planting of African palm in the Pacific region or the expansion of the shrimp industry, which have had a significant environmental impact in the region. A name in the interstice, such as the PCN, makes it possible to open the debate over the meaning of life, territories, economic production, and the equal capacity of persons to “design their own productive projects” (Escobar 2014, 99). Likewise, by insisting on the interstitial character of these processes and of their names, the idea is to embrace, by approaching them, the event that this “naming oneself” is, or, in Rancière’s terms, to be able to embrace the strength of these speech events (événements de parole). This means embracing the strength of their experimental and reconfiguring capacity to disassemble certain orders of discourse and states of things (including culturalist identifications), in order to confront exclusions-inclusions and produce new forms of identification with the miscounted, open up other spaces-times in which those who do not count now may be counted, to carve out interstices between words and things, places and identities, and the different nominations (cf. Rancière 1994, 97–98). Thinking counterconsensually also means being able to embrace “the absence of the body instead of the voice, the absence of the voice instead of the body, the rift or the interval through which subjects of history pass” (Rancière 1994, 98), despite everything.

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4.1.5.  The Arguments of Disagreement But how are this misadjustment and reconfiguration amidst given assemblages shown? How is an unprecedented mode of existence demonstrated, in the face of others that have disregarded its possibility? The answer may already be glimpsed on the basis of what we have said, and, of course, it has to do with the configuration of intervals and the heterology of political subjectivization. At stake is avoiding the false disjunctive between a rationalist position that understands political discussion in terms of “an exchange between partners putting their interests or standards up for discussion,” and a position of excess that transgresses all norms, all meaning, and touches on “the violence of the irrational” (Rancière 1999, 43).16 Processes of political subjectivization demonstrate something to someone else, by disassembling elements of a police order in order to cross them with other elements that are thus misadjusted, and build unprecedented arguments that assert the capacity for political intervention of those who have been miscounted. Now then, these arguments give reasons why things should be different in order to facilitate more egalitarian relations and affirm the understanding the actors have gained regarding the world situation they find themselves in. The construction of these arguments cannot proceed by inscribing them completely in the inegalitarian distributions they are confronting, because that would prevent them from creating disagreement with it. Neither can they aspire to exceed those distributions completely, since this would give rise to reasons that do not in any way interpellate the forms of domination they are questioning. To put it in other words, disagreement is not simply the negation of an order of sense, but rather its division, thus making it possible to evince faults, delegitimization gaps, because we are always within orders of sense that eventually clash. This means we cannot stand in front or outside them in order to question them. The fact that disagreement has to be “argued” does not mean that it is deployed through established procedures for deliberation, like those deriving from a position widely acknowledged among certain philosophical, political, and legal circles, such as that of Jürgen Habermas. For Rancière, as opposed to Habermas, the point is that “the stage [of discussion] has not been built, that the object has not been recognized, and that the very partners in the debate have not been legitimized, as such” (Rancière 1997, 34–35). Moreover, in Rancière’s view, a position like that of Habermas does not make it possible to think the conflictive character of political discussion and, therefore, to counter consensualism’s depoliticizing effects.17 In fact, from a deliberative perspective, it is crucial to guarantee that public discussion adjusts to communicative assumptions that, according to Habermas, make it possible to transform “irrational” conflicts and violent reactions into divergent, argued



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positions that might resolve their disagreements by adopting fair negotiation procedures and communicative assumptions that public deliberation itself would provide. This is why procedures that ensure “moral impartiality” and the types of reasons considered to be acceptable for those participating in the discussion are what matters according to this view. This implies that the process will be more free and impartial to the extent that the participants are less coerced and more willing to let themselves be guided by “the force of the better argument” (see Habermas 1994, 25–26; Benhabib 1996, 69–70). To claim, however, that the political is a field in which differences and conflicts can be resolved in a rational debate is problematic for several reasons. Of course, it is necessary to question whether it makes sense to speak of a rational debate, as if there were a universal and impartial form of rationality, instead of configurations arising from what is asserted as “meaningful,” “true,” “reasonable,” or as “the better argument” on the basis of historically contingent frameworks of intelligibility that have gradually become established, naturalized, or hegemonic (as Chantal Mouffe [2013a, b] has been insisting on for some years now) (Quintana 2016b). But, beyond this, it is important to question to what extent a deliberative understanding of the political allows for recognition of the fact that political conflicts (other than merely war-related ones) do not always occur as discursive differences that can be resolved through technical-instrumental procedures or i­nterlocution, which all involved parties can accept, or as in which one can count on the victory of the better argument (Quintana 2016b). The reason for this is that there are manifestations that question the given situation of interlocution, its boundaries, its intelligibility criteria, and the subjects authorized to participate in it (Quintana 2016b). An approach like Habermas’ leads to the disjunctive between “public rational deliberation” (and everything it entails) and “violent processing,” thus eliminating the place for political conflict. To formulate this in more provoking terms, it could be said that such an approach not only makes it impossible to counter the depoliticization produced by consensualism but would also contribute to fostering it, losing sight of the importance of manifestations of genuine conflict. Moreover, as Balibar has suggested (2015a, 144–49), this perspective is aporetic: when conflict exceeds the preestablished channels in which it can appear, political rationality meets its boundaries, making it impossible to integrate the conflict, which is then disqualified or repressed. This means that the idea of channeling deliberatively all conflicts according to certain rules of political argumentation can also give rise to forms of violence, or, in Balibar’s terms (2015b), of counterviolence, defensive violence against any manifestation—even when it is not warlike—that exceeds the established

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procedures, criteria, and rules. Likewise, this “repression” of manifestations that may evince genuine political conflicts can close off spaces for the political handling of the conflict, thus leading to potentially bloody forms of violence. Furthermore, one could well ask if a conflict “channeled” through preestablished rules aimed at consensus “is still a real conflict and not a legal fiction” (Balibar 2015a, 91). Would this not exclude genuine conflicts capable of facilitating deeper political, historically significant transformations on the basis of truly political challenges (Balibar 2015a, 91)?18 As I pointed out above, Chantal Mouffe has criticized similar Habermasian arguments from her perspective of radical democracy. However, Rancière believes that the rationality of disagreement also differs from the idea of antagonism set forth by Laclau and Mouffe, which the latter assumes in her proposal of agonistic democracy. Let us then delve into this difference before addressing the manner in which Rancière understands political arguments. Antagonism, as Laclau and Mouffe state in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, is the experience of the “limits of all objectivity” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 122); or, as Laclau points out in another text, “Antagonisms are not objective relations but the point where the limit of all objectivity is shown” (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000, 72). Although the notion of disagreement also involves the idea that all orders of sense produce excesses that do not let themselves be counted, disagreement is not merely this excess, but an aesthetic-political task carried out as an affirmation of equality, as analyzed above in detail. Moreover, Laclau (1990) understands that antagonism, as an experience of limit, which also entails the radical contingency of the social, as “the ‘constitutive outside’ that accompanies the affirmation of all identity” (183), that is, as the constitutive division of an identity, the impossibility of its closing. It is, thus, an ontological experience in which equality or justice is not necessarily at stake, and not one belonging to a specifically political logic. As Norris (2002) says, Laclau understands antagonism as “the logical form of reality” (557), which necessarily involves all social actors and all activities that would then be implicitly or explicitly antagonistic. Therefore, in principle there is nothing singularly political in Laclau’s antagonism, nor does it necessarily refer to a struggle for equality. I agree with Norris (2002, 560–65) that when Laclau tries to characterize political antagonism more specifically, he could be suggesting a very ambiguous relation between identity and politics, which indicates displacements with respect to the ontological view. According to the latter, all identity is incomplete and Laclau insists on the impossibility of saturating it and on how it is always necessarily exposed to the difference of every subject with respect to itself. But when he tries to characterize antagonism politically,



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Laclau seems to suggest that identities that struggle among themselves are previously constituted: So if there is going to be antagonism [between workers and capital], its source cannot be internal to the capitalist relations of production, but has to be sought in something that the worker is outside those relations, something which is threatened by them: the fact that below a certain level of wages the worker cannot live a decent life, and so on. [. . .] [T]he worker’s attitude vis-à-vis capitalism will depend entirely on how his or her identity is constituted. (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000, 202)

As Norris (2002, 560) points out, “identity” here refers to what determines the worker’s attitude, in this case, the poverty that prevents him or her from leading a decent life. This would then entail that political antagonism is driven by a prior identity that feels threatened by that which it struggles against. And this would omit the fact that emancipatory political struggles can involve the rejection of a previously given identity that denies equality, rather than the urge to preserve oneself as a certain identity. This identitarian understanding of antagonism can also be observed in Chantal Mouffe’s proposal of agonistic democracy. This proposal constitutes Mouffe’s response to what she sees as a loss of the power of mobilization and adhesion of current democratic projects, insofar as liberal democracies have tended to identify with capitalist practices and their political dimension, with the rule of law. In this context, Mouffe considers necessary a radicalization of democracy capable of confronting these projects and their derivations, on the basis of acknowledging the irreducibility of social conflict. Such irreducibility is first explained by returning to the idea of Socialist Strategy and Hegemony, according to which “the constitution of an identity is always based on excluding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between the resultant two poles—form/matter, essence/accident, blade/white, man/ woman, and so on” (Mouffe 1993, 141). In light of this, antagonism arises when the other is “perceived as putting into question the identity of the ‘we’ and as threatening its existence” (Mouffe 2005, 16). These assumptions, therefore, lead to a conception of forms of power as constitutive of social relations, which are necessarily shaped by marginalizations, exclusions, identifications, and contingent hierarchies, which have emerged historically and can be confronted. Moreover, Mouffe insists that despite liberal attempts, it is impossible to delimit an “impartial” or “neutral” sphere of the rational that is not subject to the pluralism of values or shaped by forms of power. Summarizing Mouffe’s proposal somewhat, it is a matter of pluralizing the liberal rule of law, of opening up spaces to handle conflicts through agonistic dispositifs that make it possible to acknowledge conflict without reducing it (Mouffe 2005, 14). According to Mouffe, these are dispositifs that make

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possible “drawing the we/they distinction in a way which is compatible with [. . .] pluralism” (Mouffe 2005, 16). The reference to Schmitt is crucial here. In fact, Mouffe tends to see relations of antagonism in terms of friend-enemy relations and thus assumes the idea that every creation of a “we” presupposes the determination of a “they,” which could put our existence into question. Hence her insistence that transforming antagonism into agonism means transforming an enemy into an adversary whose existence is recognized as legitimate and tolerated. Agonism thus assumes that antagonism can appear in a political space, without merely attempting to destroy or subject the other. Rather, the idea would be to handle differences not through processes of “rational deliberation” but through the “transformation of political identities” in ways that also have to do with affects and with temporary commitments or agreements that cannot eliminate forms of power and violence, but can, to a great extent, channel them. Together with these considerations, Mouffe asks herself about the manner in which antagonism can be “tamed” in such a way that it does not require a destructive relationship among enemies (Mouffe 2005, 20). Agonism would thus be a sublimation and not a reduction or neutralization of antagonism, on the basis of democratic institutions, practices, and procedures. However, one could ask, with Roskamm (2014, 7): Is it necessary to assume antagonism in Schmitt’s identitarian terms as a relation among enemies? Is it not possible to think of a form of confrontation that does not establish the other as the enemy? Moreover, one could think that if antagonism is thought in this manner, it is necessary to insist on “taming” it through institutional channels, which might reduce its conflictive character and lose sight of the fact that if conflict is irreducible, then perhaps it cannot be tamed. As Balibar (2015a, 97) has also pointed out, it is quite limiting to think all political action on the basis of the issue of identity, as its “loss, constitution, or negotiation” (Norris 2002, 565). The fact is that conflict can manifest itself in different ways and that the defining question is not merely the moment of constitution of one identity against another. For example, returning to Rancière, what might be at stake is the confrontation of a distribution of the sensible and the way it delimits a certain common space and certain subjects within that space, and not the simple confrontation between identities, regardless of how constructed and emergent they might be conceived. Let us now explore how Rancière’s reflections make it possible to think political discussion and its arguments. First of all, it is necessary to bear in mind that, as he affirmed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, arguing means, above all, showing something to someone, and that this demonstration can occur through gestures, bodies moving in a certain way, and images crossed with words, which create intervals in bodies and affect them and their gestures.



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In every case, they are created arguments that evince a right, that is, “a manifestation of the just that can be understood by the other party” (Rancière 1999, 52). According to this formulation, a political argument demonstrates a reason that requires being understood and accepted by others (see Rancière 1999, 45–46). In Habermas’ terms, what we have here is a communicative action in which validity claims that others are expected to accept are at stake: however, no given assumptions or criteria that can supposedly be required of everyone are in play here. The issue is to put into question the given configuration of the sensible, making use of the heterogeneity of available language games (verbal and gestural), in order to stage the community in which these reasons might be valid. It is also a strategic action that displaces the relations of force that determine the admissibility of utterances (cf. Rancière 1999, 47). Likewise, this action that involves the generation of an unprecedented locus of enunciation also questions the sharp distinction between aesthetic (poetic, gestural, image) languages of openness to the world and the rules of communicational activity, as well as the idea that the former need to be legitimized by the latter in order to assert themselves in a communicative action. This is so because the manifestation of dispute can express an argument that was not given, precisely by creating a scenario of visibility, a poetic order (in images, gestualities, positions of bodies)—metaphors of a situation that allow one thing to be seen in another—that makes possible a different openness to the world, in which that argument may assert itself (cf. Rancière 1999, 58). Moreover, insofar as political interlocution demonstrates something by reconfiguring the space of appearance, it always involves an aesthetic staging that relates separate regimes of expression,19 in order to create scenarios, modes of appearance, relations among bodies, and subjects that were not given (through texts, images, and gestures). The examples of these random combinations can be very diverse and arise from different sources. The demonstration known as The Taksim Square Book Club20 comes to mind. This silent demonstration, in which bodies resisted by congregating in Taksim Square at the end of June 2013 to read together but individually, took place in Turkey after the aggressive police response to the protests that had taken place in May-June of that year. They were inspired by another silent performance, that of a body standing still, alone, saying nothing, in the middle of the square after these acts of violence.21 These gestures showed how bodies can resist together yet alone, making evident their impotence, courage, fragility, perseverance, and endurance while occupying the square and being inoperative, as well as the arbitrariness and violence of the police force, which was made more visible through that gesture. We can also think about long-standing, organized collectives Latin ­America that resorted to aesthetic actions: for example, the demonstration

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known as “el Siluetazo,” mentioned in chapter 1, in which the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, together with three young artists encouraged a great number of people to set up 30,000 silhouettes of the disappeared during the dictatorship in Argentina. Thus, between September 21 and 22 of 1983, the Plaza de Mayo and the city of Buenos Aires “were perforated by the absence of those erased bodies that, through this gesture, refused to disappear” (­Quintana 2016a, 25). In a very different context, we have the installation, in front of the prosecutor’s office in the municipality of Apartadó in ­Colombia, of 178 small coffins representing the 178 victims—in 2007—from the abovementioned Community of Peace of San José de Apartadó. The installation, carried out by members of that community, made visible “the dead bodies that continue to be ‘non-existent’ for the judicial authorities of a State whose institutions, whether by omission or direct collaboration, have been responsible for violences aimed at destroying that community in resistance” (Quintana 2016a, 25). The above cases show that political argument involves an aesthetic intervention (with singular interventions on behalf of a collective, and demonstrations by engaged, organized bodies), which stages power games that subjugate or dominate bodies, the injustices and problems they suffer, and forms of handling them. This is achieved through gestures, utterances, the very appearance of their organized bodies rallied together, and in the relations and contacts that can occur among them. The above examples also show that this aesthetic-political intervention operates through the shaping of political subjects whose demonstrations do not make much sense within the existing grammar of the common, but is endowed with meaning in other collective arrangements that the demonstrators take as if they existed, amidst the order of the sensible in which they are intervening. Political arguments are, then, poetic arguments, arguments-gestures, always arguments-in-act, deployed by corporealities whose unprecedented claims also show that they can do what was not expected of them.22 These not necessarily verbal demonstrations displace and modify embodied practices of sense, many of them verbal, that can be appropriated and deployed in polemic scenarios, thus fracturing existing corporealizations (Quintana 2016a, 16). For this reason, political arguments always have a corporeal, affective dimension, which cuts across the constitution and demonstration of a political subject. And what distinguishes these arguments is not that they always necessarily occur in discursive practices, but that they are capable of producing “polemical scenes” that exist in the mode of the as if (Rancière 2009c), of the incorporeal, of that which has and does not have a place: “these paradoxical scenes, that bring out the contradiction between two logics, by positing existences that are at the same time nonexistences—or nonexistences that are at the same time existences” (Rancière 1999, 41).



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As I said above, these polemical scenes assert a right, one that can be understood as the political structure of disagreement: We are right to argue for our rights and so to posit the existence of a common world of argument. And we are right to do so precisely because those who ought to recognize it do not, because they act as though they are ignorant of the existence of this common world. (Rancière 1999, 53; my emphasis)

In other texts, I have referred to this right that asserts, as if it existed, a common world of argument and makes it possible to question the given inegalitarian world (Quintana 2014b, 2016c). It is the claim of a collective subject in order to assert its claims as common claims that concern not just that collective but all those who form part of the order of sense that is being confronted. Therefore, it requires “the universalization of the conflict,” because it vindicates the fact that what is at stake in a determined social conflict is the very distribution of the common, the manner in which a common world and the way one participates in it is understood (Quintana 2016c).23 At the same time, Rancière suggests that in order to construct those claims, many modern political manifestations can resort to the Declaration of Human Rights or to the preambles of codes and constitutions that have incorporated common forms of equality, privatized once and again in historical circumstances. In this sense, those instituted rights can also be assumed as premises of arguments that make it possible to build litigious cases and polemical reasons, thus opening gaps among the terms involved (between the human and women, the human and the black or indigenous person, etc.). That is, those rights may be assumed politically, asserting that the mode of being of the law is none other than the “exteriority of writing” (Rancière 1999, 67), the fact they are texts that can always be verified anew in unprecedented situations and that no social or state institution can ever fully realize. For example, “in nineteenth-century France, workers might construct the logic of a strike in the form of a syllogism: Do French workers belong to the category of Frenchmen? If not, the Declaration of Rights has to be changed” (Rancière 1992, 60). The initial question shows the gap between the fact that the law of the country defines a relation of equality among all Frenchmen, including workers and employers (major premise), and the fact that in labor decisions, especially in establishing wages, the equality between workers and employers is not recognized and wages are established unilaterally (minor premise). In this case, then, the protest constructs a common scene in which the workers verify their equality, their right to be recognized as interlocutors with reasons (logos), with whom it is possible to argue—and not merely as producers of mere “noise” or voice (phoné) who only react to their ­necessities—and as interlocutors that affirm the public character of an issue

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that had been relegated to private decision. In this manner, they behave “as if the scene of interlocution existed” and as if “there were a common world of argument” between workers and employers, which in fact does not exist (especially if the employer interprets the manifested disagreement merely in terms of “violent revolt”). The manifestation shows that very inexistence, but using elements of the discursive order which it invalidates at the same time. Although it might seem that a universal is being appealed to here, the universality does not lie in concepts that could be considered “universally binding,” but in the “argumentative process” that reveals the consequences of some concepts—recognized within the confronted orders of sense—in which both an inscription of equality and an egalitarian excess are found. Universality resides, then, in the “discursive and practical implementation” of these concepts, in the verification of equality expressed in arguments that affirm what follows from considering workers or women as citizens, for example, or considering those people identified by the police logic as “black” to be “human beings” (see Rancière 1992, 60; Quintana 2014c). What follows is also showing that an allegedly universal understanding of the human has also excluded certain subjects and, therefore, challenging that universality and requiring that it be reconfigured. It could be said then that to argue politically is above all to demand the right to intervene politically, and that this is achieved by appealing to (1) existing rights in which forms of equality are inscribed. These already instituted rights are affirmed as premises of political arguments in order to assert (through very different forms of manifestation) or demonstrate unrecognized claims. But they can also be (2) rights constructed in popular mobilizations, conquered through the same forms of self-organization displayed by those movements, in order to manifest demands that are not respected or recognized in the given institutional practices and demonstrated. Evidently, this political understanding of rights makes it possible to critically question a functionalist reading that sees in every use of rights by social actors a reactive demand, which simply expects to be recognized by the state and integrated into it. But it also allows for distance from a critical interpretation of such uses that see in all mobilization of a right its mere capture by the state’s legal regulations (Agamben 1995; Butler 1997a, 23–24; 2000, 176; Hamacher 2014). These views lose sight of the practices of political creation that may be at stake when popular movements claim their rights, as well as of its potential to reconfigure a common space. In light of the above, one could say that a political understanding of right confronts the established forms of acting or being treated, in order to vindicate other possibilities of action and treatment, on the basis of an experimental effort carried out from a situated experience of bodies. In any case, these are required vindications that emerge in the name of an unfinished



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collective subject, a “subject” that resists the forms according to which it has been identified and pinned down by the instituted rights, and is open to the transformability of the human (see Foucault, in Martin 1988; Quintana 2016d, 127). Thus, more than erasing the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, the idea is to consider it a fluid, displaceable boundary, as an always mobile passage whereby the human, in its relation and interdependence with things, the organic, and the animal, creates different intervals between those assemblages. On the basis of the path we have followed, it is possible to conclude that political subjectivization can be conceived as a series of processes of experimentation that reconfigure established identities and boundaries between the objective and the subjective, activity and passivity, knowledge and ignorance, the human and the nonhuman, nature and culture, life and world. 4.2.  AGAINST THE GRAIN OF CONSENSUS: THE DEMAND FOR BUEN VIVIR (GOOD LIVING) Although material work and the extraction of surplus value still play a more important role than one could think in Western societies, it is difficult today to conceive anti-capitalist struggle as a frontal attack by the producers of surplus against those who monopolize it. That struggle tends to blend into a more diffuse struggle against the different forms in which capitalist logic requires our bodies and thoughts, transforms our environment and our forms of life. For this reason, today it is very difficult to distinguish between the supposedly central and objective battles against the fortress of capital and emancipation regarding the modes of community that it builds and the forms of subjectivity it requires. (Rancière 2017a, 55; my emphasis)

If “the world” we live in is an assemblage of practices and experiences that have configured an order of sense and perception that is always conflictive, and capitalism, with its practices and forms of rationality, has also constituted that world, then opposition to it cannot be conceived in terms of a “frontal attack” or of the destruction of a fortress in order to liberate a territory or some dispossessed work forces. For this same reason, disagreement cannot be understood as a unified global struggle against an enemy to be defeated, because that world is a heterogeneous one that has produced different practices, manifestations, and effects, which may be countered through interventions and strategies that are also different and can be connected though not reduced to a sole path or level of intervention. Because of this and also because, for Rancière, any emancipatory economic-social struggle is already a struggle over the distribution of sense and perception, it would not be

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possible to think of a principal, critical, and urgent systematic confrontation at the economic-social level against capitalism, or of cultural struggles for recognition against its effects on subjects, which would be secondary with respect to the former. Both must be intertwined in current emancipatory efforts, as struggles against economic-social forms of intervention that affect modes of relation and the fabric of everyday life, which propose other understandings of life, of being-with-others, of territory, and of the city as paths to imagine and plan other forms of political and economic organization. The notion of “buen vivir” (good living), produced and mobilized by popular movements in Latin America, illustrates precisely that articulation of levels and forms of intervention that does not allow for separations or hierarchies between the socioeconomic level and that of the forms of relation to others (human beings, living beings, landscapes, environments, and things) and to oneself (self-construction practices). This concept, which is in the process of being elaborated (Acosta and Gudynas 2011, 76), has been used polemically to confront developmental models based on mere economic growth, by reactivating knowledge and practices that have been subalternized, especially indigenous ones, which are contaminated and crossed by social discourses on rights, Marxist and post-Marxist understandings, and decolonial anthropological contributions. From the perspective of this heterological crossing of discourses and practices, the demand for good living attempts to shape more egalitarian forms of being together, which facilitate solidarity-based, more ecologically sustainable economies, with greater local self-government (cf. Quintana 2016d).24 Thus, this conceptual development, generated by various Latin American movements, makes it possible to open up political discussion regarding the mechanisms for modernization, development,25 and politicaleconomic intervention, which have been introduced vertically in the region, and suggest an alternative to them. This alternative presupposes another understanding of nature (that is not merely instrumental or objectivizing), as well as a different understanding of territories as spaces of cultural and affective life. These spaces cannot be simply subjected to top-down forms of intervention that disregard and destroy local processes of appropriation by de-territorializing them and undoing processes carried out in and from the territories, or at least not without at the same time destroying those spaces and the life within them. The notion of buen vivir is linked to another key notion in Latin American popular movements (particularly in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil): that of “territory,”26 which has developed out of the situated experience of these movements in their daily relation practices and in their political struggles. However, this notion “is not equivalent to the notion of land, typical of the peasant-oriented discourse of previous decades” (Escobar 2014, 90), nor, clearly, does it correspond to the sovereign nation-state’s or



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the consensualist understandings of territory as “a unit of observation, action, and management for State planning” (Schneider and Peyré 2006). On the contrary, it questions them. In fact, territory is assumed as a space of life interpreted by affects, constituted by traditions, social and cultural practices, and also power relations generated in local communities. Therefore, it is not the pure, uncontaminated ancestral place of community reconciliation. It is rather a material and symbolic space, enriched and appropriated “through cultural, agricultural, ecological, economic, ritual practices” (Escobar 2014, 90). These practices are conceived as social processes of resignification and symbolic appropriation without fixed boundaries, which give rise to a “porous interweaving” (Escobar 2014, 90) between the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the cultural, the organic and the inorganic. The work carried out by these popular movements can also be thought in terms of those forms of appropriation that “reinvent” territories as space of life by “reinventing other forms of territorialized rationality,” thus posing resistance to neoliberal deterritorialization and globalization. In so doing, “they redefine the environment and its cultural identities in order to build sustainable worlds” (Escobar 2014, 93), open to the emancipatory reconfiguration of their borders. Thus, “buen vivir” recognizes the relationality of bodies, their mutual interdependence and vulnerability, and the fact that they need social, technological, affective, and environmental support networks, without which there is no life. As observed in several popular movements in Colombia, this notion has served as connecting node of various egalitarian struggles: (1) As the Peoples’ Congress we believe that a decision-making, participation scenario is important for society, especially for popular and democratic sectors that are minorities or have been excluded. Let the voices of those struggling for a dignified be heard! Let us build peace from the perspective of the citizens, peasants, indigenous peoples, black communities, workers, students, those crushed by this deathly system [. . .]! (http://congresodelospueblos.org /index.php/37-comunicacion-oficial/prensa/201-congreso-de-los-pueblos-en -las-luchas-contra-el-despojo-y-por-la-vida-digna. Page no longer available) (2) There, as peasant men and women, we build social and communitarian relations; we have a direct and special relation with the earth, nature, and water, resulting from social and productive processes and practices in which past and present are joined in the construction of a dignified life and of good living in the countryside. (CNA. Launching of the first Agri-food Territory in northern Nariño and southern Cauca. Agri-food Territories—CNA. Posted in Facebook on November 25, 2016) (3) We are romantics with respect to the territory, and one day in a big assembly we built a quite poetic concept of territory; poetic, for us, has more to do with sensibilities. It defines territory as the place we inhabit, the place we identify with, where our memories are, where we build our present and project

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our dreams. It is the place we share, where we get our food, where we work according to our customs, whether indigenous, peasant, Afro; it is the place we protect, where our family is, the place that triggers ours emotions and feelings, where we build relations with nature, with the community, and with ourselves, because the territory is memory and memory is what we are. (Female peasant leader, member of a women’s process belonging to ACIT, peasant process of Inza, Tierra Adentro, Cauca; my emphasis)27

In these testimonies, which I decided to cite extensively in order to show the singularity of their conceptual elaboration, the notion of good living is almost interchangeable with that of dignified life. Therefore, the dignity claimed here does not refer to a lost sense of subjective integrity that needs to be reappropriated or recovered by individuals. On the contrary, it refers to a transindividual life, displayed in a web of relationships that frame the interdependence of bodies among themselves and their dependence on the organic and inorganic nonhuman (mountains, rivers, animals).28 Moreover, this notion makes it possible to articulate numerous struggles of very diverse movements that have been developing in Colombia, for example, the “Peoples’ Congress” or the “Agrarian Summit.” These integration platforms, created by the movements themselves, though quite debilitated today, do tend to gather voices that have been marginalized by the dominant consensual logic and that propose a de-privatization of the common by defending dignified life. This is an elaboration of the common as that which results from the convergence of collective actions, based on local networks and developed from the bottom up. One could also think that, against essentializing and reifying forms of the common (Dardot and Laval 2019, 16ff., 28), these practices evince that the common (common subjects, common objects, common problems) can only emerge out of articulation efforts in the territories, on the basis of political activity and its dissensual dispositifs of relation. Thus, in their practices and in the organization and participation mechanisms they create, these movements are concerned with the way of displaying, in the movements themselves, those forms of construction of the common that they are vindicating politically. In this sense, they are proposals for popular participation, for a different democracy (based on local construction of the common, on self-government), aimed at protecting territories from large-scale economic interventions that destroy the environment and its complex vital network, and at outlining more ecologically sustainable economic projects, in line with the complexities of the territories. Specific demands that have been at stake are that of food sovereignty29 and a mining and energy strategy, decided on and consulted with the territories, thus defending an “agroecological model” under construction, “based on respect for the environment and for the traditional forms of knowledge of peoples



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and communities” (Cumbre Nacional Agraria Campesina, Étnica y Popular 2014). These are then projects in which the design of other forms of economic organization is inseparable from the political affirmation of the capacity of the actors to decide on them. Because, to say it with Rancière (2016d): “the power of anyone at all should be able to be exercised as much in relation to supposedly ecological issues as in relation to labour and its forms of organization or manifestation in the public arena” (180). Furthermore, these proposals clearly show that the understanding of dignified life includes the manner in which territories can organize themselves according to life projects decided on collectively, which make it possible to assume the temporality of the world, at the intersection of times. This is evident in text (2) when it speaks about the encounter between past and present that has to be achieved in a dignified life project, given that the relationality of life involves embracing the traces of the past, of that which has not been but could still be and is beginning to be in the present, in those appropriation processes that expand the possibilities of that present on the basis of that dense interweaving of everyday experience that is also a weaving of dreams and specters, as suggested in testimony (3). This is the opposite of consensual projects that bury that which has not been and establish a single possibility (of development, modernization, progress, and global economic growth): that which can be in the uniformity of one world. For this reason, according to the last testimony, that of Alix, a female peasant leader, territory means memory, and memory is displayed in collective appropriation tasks, such as the one carried out by the women’s organization process she belongs to (we women are memory). As a matter of fact, this testimony is a good expression of the importance of affects in this understanding of good living and their relation to memories, to the dreams that permeate those spaces and constitute them, to the virtuality of life, and to the materiality of what occurs every day, in the most trivial activities that bodies engage in and share. Thus, the testimony highlights the everyday corporeal dimension that also has to be at stake in a project aimed at dignified life. As Alix pointed out in other parts of her testimony, this was crucial when, together with others, she decided to organize a women’s space to confront the violence they endured on the part of their spouses, many of whom belonged to the peasant movement, and to demand that said movement, in its struggle for dignified life, embrace feminist claims against different types of gender violence and subjection. These violences are deeply rooted in the racisms of the country’s “whitened” elites, as well as in indigenous and black communities (see Viveros 2009, 73–74). In Alix’s words, This has been a very tough struggle because in Colombia, let’s say, like in the rest of the world, patriarchalism and machismo are radicalized, but much more in peasant and rural sectors. It was not easy to manage to get into a space, not to

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be the gals who took care of the logistics for the assembly, or who peeled potatoes for the community potluck; it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t easy for us to position ourselves in order to teach women that they should not go to those spaces to cook and take care of logistics, but to participate, listen, and pay attention.30

That is how forms of identitarian fixation and inequality are confronted within movements that vindicate forms of equality while denying others, thus showing that these subjections are deeply rooted and inscribed in everyday life and that transforming them requires a subtle and daily work on the relations of bodies, their spaces, and their times. In this sense, they are struggles that reveal the necessary articulation between the daily work of bodies and the political efforts aimed at equality, and develop a broad, quotidian understanding of good living that has to begin in the domestic space of the home. As Alix says, “In every home, women should have democracy in bed, in what I like, what I don’t like, where he can touch me, where he can’t touch me, where I don’t like to be touched or how he touches me [. . .], good living must emerge from the home, the bed, the hearth.” I continue citing her testimony in extenso, given its force: As women, we talked about a dignified life, at least the campaign to stop violence was “women struggling for a dignified life, free of violences,” and then we women said: “Do you know what dignified life is?” “Yes, but it seems so far away, miles away, that is autopia.” Then we said, OK, how can we work in order to bring that dignified life closer? Let’s do something then to live will, for good living, and so we began grinding away at changing those small things we find in every home, in every space, in order to really transform, and that means that in your house you should have a bathroom, because in some houses in the rural sector there are no bathrooms. And I have an eight-year-old granddaughter and the day we had the good living workshop about what good living was, she said: “I think the best thing that can happen to people is to have a bathroom so they can go do what they have to do in peace.” And we said yes, because having to go out into the coffee fields to pee is uncomfortable, and then she said, “Why don’t you make a bathroom in each one of your houses so you can sit down comfortably?” And look, in the bathroom you can sit down and rest and think about a lot of things and [. . .] so [one has to] change those words that seem as far away as a dignified life for something that brings it closer, like what is good living for me, which does not mean having a house, a car, and a scholarship, it means having the minimum conditions of dignity to live well in each space you are in; that means an overall change.

These words make it possible to revisit some aspects discussed in chapter 2. Alix states in her testimony that dignified life has to do with minimum conditions (like having a bathroom) that allow bodies to stop and think, not as



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an abstract, disembodied activity but as a situated movement that involves a body’s practices of appropriation of its own movement, of the spaces it inhabits and traverses, of the times of everyday life that can be perforated by other times, times in which nothing happens, in which the world of obligations is suspended and anything can happen, unique times and spaces in which bodies can have a space for themselves, for a job of singularization that allows them to open up to the relationality of the life they are throwed into, amidst the daily functional tasks and most immediate needs. We could then conclude that the effect of the experiential, conceptual, and political organization work summed up in the elaborations and uses of the notions of “territory,” “dignified life,” and “good living” by various popular movements in Colombia is the creation of dissensual manifestations that produce understandings of life, nature, the common, and rights other than those dominant in contemporary consensualism, and the tearing apart of the cohesive social body the latter aims at. Above all, these are situated, corporeal understandings, arising from experience in the territories and their conflicts, as opposed to the vertical, global, deterritorialized (decontextualized and universalizing) understandings of consensualism and its different dispositifs of dispossession. The above also made it possible to see that these experimentation practices aim at creating ways of being-with-others, of organization, and of institutions in which the requirement of equality is inscribed and that are more open to handling their conflicts and transforming them. Thus, in their resistance and antagonism to consensual logics and forms of rationality, these movements invent other reasons and attempt to give life to a relational rationality, amidst the inequalities that cut across their practices. And they do so through a work of creation and experimentation with different arguments and strategies, displayed in a continuum between the public manifestation of their demands and the articulations they gradually produce in their everyday lives. With respect to the public demands that have affected the everyday network of relations, the use made by these organizations of the rights granted by the Colombian legal order is worth highlighting, as is the manner in which they have turned them around in order to question some of their interpretations and materializations (in decrees, legal measures, government interventions). The fact that these organizations have created new institutional forms and other rights, which assert and show the power of everyone, is also remarkable. Likewise, they are experiences produced by social actors exposed to unimaginable violences (often displaced persons, constantly threatened, precarized, and victimized by different forms of state and para-state intervention), who have managed to reshape and cope with affects of hate, anger, and resentment, through practices that are always tense, conflictive, and exposed

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to failure. Such reshaping has occurred not only in forms of indignation, rejection, saying no, and endurance but also in practices of solidarity, openness to the pain of others based on the acknowledgment of shared conditions of precarity, affects of fragility and vulnerability that constitute bodies and their memories, and of failed histories in the force diagrams of temporality. These affects have driven the desire to be in another way and live differently among others, without having to blame a social actor for the painful situations they have gone through. For this reason, these practices also involve a task of corporeal reinterpretation and sharing of suffering, expressed in ways of doing, in manifestations aimed at first rejecting consensual, humanitarian, victimizing forms of visibilization and treatment, in order to reveal a wrong. This wrong demands a different understanding of the actors involved, of their worlds, and their possibilities, on the basis of formulations (diagnoses, proposals, relations) set forth by those same actors in the hope of affecting our too privatized world, whose current consensual configurations lack so much commonality. In fact, these are also demonstrations of the capacities of bodies, in which they also demonstrate to themselves what they thought they were incapable of; that is, in manifesting themselves collectively with others, they emancipate themselves individually and, therefore, find new meanings for their lives, which drive them, with the force of desire, to be capable of other things. In Rancière’s (2016d) words, “We’ve constantly seen that a militant practice was a practice that not only produced an accumulation of knowledge and skills but also an intensification of desire” (117).31 This affective effect also has to do with a complex issue we have yet to reflect on: the effectiveness of these emancipatory political actions. On the basis of the above, one could say that these actions are already effective insofar as they have affected life in the territories, allowing for other forms of relation among bodies, which have made it possible to deal with trauma and mourning, resisting hatred and resentment through affects of collaboration and solidarity, driven by the power of desire to be able to do things with others. This is achieved through the torsion and reinvention of some of the resources of humanitarianism and multiculturalism, in order to turn around the victimization they produce. They are also movements that have influenced transformations of state institutions, such as those included in the Colombian Constitution of 1991, which have brought about new subjections, as well as possibilities of counteracting them. And they are movements that have affected long-term processes for Colombia, such as the discussion on peacebuilding after the agreements and negotiations with insurgent movements (despite the fact that many of the organizations mentioned here demanded greater participation and influence in the process with the FARC,



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and that the current administration is today bent on destroying the achieved agreements). It is essential not to lose sight of the fact that despite the defeats, persecution, and destruction they have suffered, these movements have managed to defend their territories from privatizing and predatory economic interventions, as well as from state, private, and para-state forms of dispossession, or that, when these interventions have in fact occurred, as is frequent in Colombia, they have fought to “visibilize” them, with all of the difficulties this entails in a context in which forms of visibilization are dominated by the “information machines” of the great economic conglomerates. In fact, one could say that by vindicating modes of recognition and forms of experiencing these situations, as well as counter-consensual forms of visibilization, these movements produce “places for discussing collective interests that escape the monopoly of the expert government” (Rancière 2006b, 83) and question the latter. Likewise, these forms of experimentation, reflection, and conceptual and political creation have given rise to other vocabularies and figures to imagine the common, the human, nature, and life, beyond competition and commodification, starting out from the given grammars (of communities and of consensualism, of critical academia, and religious imaginaries). They have thus positioned themselves as voices with concrete proposals for a political ecology and that have much to contribute to global debates on this issue. Finally, these practices of local self-government and self-­ organization, of struggles in favor of the common and against consensualism’s privatization of spaces demand that democracy be rethought and popular institutions be created, and leave open questions regarding how to foster institutional arrangements that are more receptive to social conflict and its egalitarian struggles. At stake in these different—bottom-up, relational, and ­ecological-political—forms of thinking being-with-others (human and nonhuman) are situated reflections and regarding “the production, defense, and enhancement of conditions for the reproduction of life as a whole [. . .], beyond the reproduction of life as workforce for the reproduction of capital” (Gutiérrez 2017, 70, 141). I now wish to dwell on this institutional dimension, which has been little or tangentially touched upon in Rancière’s thought, in order to ask whether it is possible to imagine and create dissensual institutions and a dissensual commons, which affect state configurations in the sense of making them more democratic and egalitarian, and how it would be possible to produce a reflection in this direction, going beyond the disjunction between state-centrism and autonomism (anti-state), or the disjunctive between reformism and revolutionary politics, which are both unsatisfactory, as I shall argue below.

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NOTES   1.  In this paragraph, I gather some of the considerations formulated in Quintana (2016c).   2.  A notion elaborated on and appropriated by the different movements that form part of the Peoples’ Congress, a platform created in October 2010, which gathers different popular movements (peasants, indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, students) that had been organizing themselves in Colombia (see Congreso de los Pueblos 2015, 8). Today, January 2019, this platform has been greatly weakened by different recent events, among them, the victory in 2018 of a right-wing government, which has brought about an intensification of the persecution of egalitarian social movements and the assassination of their leaders.   3.  In French (as in English), tort means “error,” wrong, and deprivation of a right. The etymology of the term is significant: tort (n.) mid-13c., “injury, wrong,” from Old French tort “wrong, injustice, crime” (11c.), from Medieval Latin tortum “injustice,” noun use of neuter of tortus “wrung, twisted,” past participle of Latin torquere “turn, turn awry, twist, wring, distort” (from PIE root *terkw—“to twist”). Legal sense of “breach of a duty, whereby someone acquires a right of action for damages” was first recorded in 1580s (see https://www.etymonline.com/word/tort). It corresponds to the Spanish tuerto, or one-eyed, and the Italian torto, or injustice, error. It is thus a necessary error, a miscount equivalent to not seeing well, an invisibilization, but also an “injustice” that can occur in every order of “justice.”   4.  Arturo Escobar has shown this well in his work, conceiving it in terms of a cultural policy and a political culture, in a broad sense of culture that has nothing to do with affiliation to a determined world of beliefs, habits, and practices. It is, rather, a matter of inventing practices and modes of relation that create tense and dynamic worlds and ways of being with one another (cf. Escobar 1995, 170–71). In line with this broad meaning, Escobar has opted for speaking about struggles in which conflicts between ontologies are at stake, particularly between a relational (ecopolitical) ontology and a Cartesian, modernist, developmental ontology (Escobar 2014). As I have already stated, Rancière prefers to think this level of reinvention and division of the given world into various worlds in aestheticcartographic (and not ontological) terms in order to highlight its experimental character of intervention and its openness to other experiences of equality and of the common.  5. An author widely read by some of the workers that appear in Proletarian Nights, especially Gauny (cf. Rancière 1983a, 93).   6.  In speaking of “regulated violence,” Rancière is not saying that there are rules for political expression; in fact, the contrary can be inferred. It is, rather, that said expression disrupts given rules, piercing them, creating gaps-intervals in the midst of established social rules, and thus reverts and displaces them, calling for their transformation.   7.  Nevertheless, the dependency of bodies and the possibility of exceeding the assigned identifications are such that even in the midst of war, at certain moments of daily life, those identifications can be exceeded and encounters, affectations, and identitarian alterations can be produced.



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  8.  In his master’s thesis, Anders Fjeld (2011) suggests a very interesting reading, based on Rancière, of this case (preceded by the less well-known gesture of Claudette Colvin, whom Parks would have imitated).   9.  Here I revisit some of the reflections set forth in Quintana (2014b). 10.  The word banlieue already points to a space at the margins, a “zone of social abandonment” (Biehl 2005): lieu (place) to which people are relegated through a ban, outlawed from the cité or center of political and social life. One could think here of Agamben’s ban (cf. Agamben 1995, 34), reinterpreted not in terms of sovereign inclusion-exclusion but in terms of a politics of abandonment. 11.  Although Rancière does not dwell much on the issue of violence, he is careful to say that it can be twisted around, reverted, countered by political dispositifs, but he never says it can be eliminated. 12. Clearly not in the police sense of civilization that functions dichotomously ­vis-à-vis what it considers barbaric, which are concepts linked to an inegalitarian colonial logic, but rather, in Balibar’s sense, that is, in terms of remodulations, dispositifs capable of countering, reverting, and torsioning the effects of violence (what Balibar [2015b] calls forms of anti-violence). 13.  This has been highlighted by the researcher of Latin American popular struggles, Raquel Gutiérrez: “ ‘We, ordinary working people,’ ‘We, the Aymara, who have lived on these lands from times immemorial,’ ‘We, the peoples of Oaxaca gathered in a Popular Assembly.’ What those engaged in struggles call themselves is an essential clue to understanding both what is being disputed in that particular struggle and the possible scope of those actions” (Gutiérrez 2017, 29–30). 14.  However, Rancière’s nonnormativity does not in any way imply a relativist position, because what is at stake in an emancipatory political action are arguments asserting reasons that hope to be recognized by others (i.e., a claim to universality is mobilized), on the basis of the verification of the equality of anyone. 15. I am thinking here of some readings of Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1996). 16.  This can be seen as a false disjunctive because one position presupposes the other: the rationalist position makes it possible to describe this excess as irrational. At the same time, the attempt to break down rationalism as reduction to meaning could lead to a position that seeks nonmeaning. 17. In this paragraph, I take up some of the arguments I developed earlier in Quintana (2016b). 18.  I shall expand these considerations in the following chapter. 19.  I will not dwell here on the manner in which, according to Rancière, modern (European) political practices were affected by the change entailed by the “aesthetic revolution” (when confronting the representational and ethical regime of art), which he suggested in Disagreement and later in Aisthesis. That revolution made possible the multiplication of dispositifs for the subjectivization of dispute in modern politics, in which the miscounted can be counted. 20. See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/06/reading-as-resistance -the-taksim-square-book-club. 21. I am referring to the performance Standing Man, by Erdem Gunduz, in Taksim Square on June 17, 2013. After a few hours, his performance rallied many

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other people who repeated the gesture of standing still in the square and did so for eight hours, until they were disbanded by the police (See “ ‘Standing man’ inspires Turkish protesters in Istanbul.” BBC, June 18, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news /world-europe-22949632). Rancière himself comments on this action: “There are the interruptions of the normal course of the hours of the day and the actions that the standing man symbolized in his performance at Taksim Square, standing, silent, for eight hours facing the Atatürk cultural center, a time of interruption that is also one of these new forms of encounter between the time of artistic performance and that of political action” (Rancière 2015, 17). 22.  The corporeal character of political struggles, which is fundamental for this book, cannot be thought on the basis of Laclau’s understanding of antagonism, derived from a totally discourse-centered ontology. 23.  This right that is not an instituted right but the political structure of disagreement or political dispute is something that Raquel Gutiérrez (2017) has also observed in her works on the Bolivian uprisings between 2000 and 2005, something she refers to as “social sovereignty.” In her words: “The central political issue raised by those struggles was the question of so-called ‘social sovereignty,’ that is, the right to directly make collective decisions regarding matters that concern us all” (36; my emphasis). 24.  The understanding of “buen vivir” has been greatly influenced by the notion of sumak kawsay, set forth by the Kichwa, in Ecuador, as well as by that of suma qamaña, developed by the Aymara, which have been incorporated into the constitutions of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), respectively. Suma qamaña refers to a “broad wellbeing based on the harmony between the material and spiritual dimensions, which depends, to a great extent, on the community and environmental context represented by the Andean ayllu. The Ecuadorian sumak kawsay refers to the community space, characterized by reciprocity, coexistence with nature, social responsibility” (Acosta and Gudynas 2011, 79). 25. Bearing in mind that developmentalism and modernization fundamentally involve these principles: “the rational individual, not bound to a place or community; the separation of nature and culture; economy separated from the social and the natural; the primacy of expert knowledge over any other knowledge” (Escobar 2009, 261). 26. According to Arturo Escobar (2014, 82–83), whose studies are based on the work of theoretician-activist Walter Porto-Gonçalves, the indigenous and peasant mobilizations over the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador and Bolivia toward the end of the 1980s; the struggles of seringueiros and Afro-descendants in Brazil; Afrodescendant and indigenous struggles in Colombia; and the Zapatista process in Mexico were crucial for the development of this notion of territory. 27.  Testimony gathered in May 2015, in the context of the event “Forms of political action from civil society,” which I referred to in chapter 3. 28.  Although people tend to think that the spiritualization of nature is more typical of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, it is also present in peasant culture, often with an animistic conception of native seeds (as I was able to confirm in conversations with members of the peasant movement and anthropologists who have done fieldwork with them) and a personification of the environment. Rivers come to mind,



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as seen in the figure of the Mohán, as portrayed in the documentary Los abrazos del río, by Colombian filmmaker Nicolás Rincón-Gille, which I will discuss in chapter 6. 29. That is, “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally adequate food products, produced through [environmentally] sustainable methods, as well as the right to define their own agricultural and food systems” (Vía Campesina 2011; Ordóñez 2013). 30.  Alix’s words are part of a testimony gathered in May 2015, in the context of the event “Forms of political action from civil society.” 31. This is something that members of popular movements insisted on in their conversations with me: the manner in which participating in those initiatives drove their desire to do things, to change their lives. Nashieli Rangel Loera (2016, 181) has also emphasized this point in her work with the Sin-tierra in Brazil.

Chapter 5

Institutions of Disagreement, Institutions of the Common? Extending Emancipatory Intervals beyond an Organic Social Body By mapping certain emancipatory practices in the previous chapter, we saw how, in view of the multiple forms of dispossession of the possibilities of bodies and of the closing and fixation of their field of experience, bodies can rebel against the blind power of what is, of what is presented to them as given, necessary, and inevitable, in order to “place in common their desire to live a different life” (Rancière 2016c, 117). These are heterotopic spaces that allow for the creation of other places, in the midst of the established ones. However, one could ask how these spaces are able to have a transformative effect on consensualism’s dominant forms of organization, visibly and significantly altering its arrangements and parameters of sense and meaning. How can those emancipatory intervals be extended and made to last in institutional arrangements other than the established forms of producing and regulating a social body? How would it be possible to rethink the social and political space as a common space, beyond the traditional, but not less current, image of a well-integrated, cohesive social body? These are valid questions, given that I have been reflecting on these intervals through a dialogue among ­Rancière, whose position is, according to many (Žižek 2006; May 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Hallward 2009; Castro Gómez 2015; Myers 2016) antiinstitutional and anti-state, the productions of social movements (such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico, the Peace Community of SJA in Colombia, or the Peoples’ Congress), and certain anthropological approaches (such as those of Escobar 2008, 2009, 2014; Gutiérrez 2014, 2017) that underscore the autonomy of these experimentations with respect to consolidated state and institutional logics. Therefore, opening the field of reflection for this part of the book involves the critical examination of influential readings of Rancière’s thought and of certain approaches to current emancipatory practices, which prevent thinking 163

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the relation between the latter and state and non-state institutions, in terms other than the mere nonrelation or the rejection of one by the other. Moreover, such readings make it impossible to understand the institutional dimension as a tense field of experimentation that may be open to conflict and to the changes produced by egalitarian movements, whose autonomy, as I shall argue here, does not have to lead to autonomist or anti-state positions. In fact, to announce one of the lines of reflection of this chapter, the idea is to go beyond a series of oppositions that have become ingrained in the discussion of these issues, in order to think the terms of these oppositions against the grain: beyond state-centrism and anti-state positions; beyond the idea of spontaneity, as opposed to that of organization; beyond reformist temporality and a present that is what it is, and the temporality of a revolutionary future yet to come. The idea is to rethink the relation between emancipatory practices and institutions in such a way that the former cannot be characterized simply as movements of dispersion and de-totalization vis-à-vis the state (as argued, e.g., by Zibechi [2010], following the classical reflections of Clastres [1974], on the basis of the more contemporary proposal of Hardt and Negri [2000, 2004]); and that the latter cannot be seen as mere ordering, regulation, cohesion, and social control dispositifs (as the cited anti-state positions, but also liberal institutionalist, republican, neo-institutionalist, and sociological approaches, tend to think1). In order to flesh out everything at stake here, I shall follow the following path: first, I will challenge the most frequent interpretation of Rancière’s thought, which considers it anti-institutionalist, by critically examining its most recent formulation by Ella Myers (2016) in an article that gathers some of the main perspectives in the exegesis of that thought in the United States. Subsequently, I will take up some elements from the previous chapter in order to discuss Rancière’s notion of democracy and the manner in which egalitarian struggles can make use of institutional resources and, at the same time, produce egalitarian institutional inscriptions. My interest here is to argue that Rancière’s position is neither state-centered nor anti-state, and then, taking these and other related elements into account, to ask what it would mean to talk about emancipatory institutions. I shall then propose two lines of reflection that Rancière has not dealt with directly, but that could be close to his concerns. On the one hand, I will dwell on the difference between the common and the res publica, and between Rancière’s view of the common and that of republicanism, in order to return to contemporary reflections on logics of construction of the common, situated in concrete experiences, particularly in political experimentation in Bolivia (Gutiérrez 2014, 2017). On this basis and resorting to other formulations (such as those of Dardot and Laval 2014), I shall tentatively set forth some lines of reflection regarding what both state and non-state institutions of the common could be like, leaving open some



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challenges and problems. On the other hand and to close the chapter, I will resort to Balibar’s contributions (2015a, b) to discuss certain institutionalist views that oppose institutions to violence and aim at neutralizing social conflict, in order to open up paths of critical reflection on these possible institutions exposed to conflict and capable of countering violence, without being able to eliminate it. The path outlined in this chapter is, therefore, tentative and full of uncertainties, open to the unpredictability of contingency, to what is already happening and forces us to question ourselves from the density of the present and the uncertain, more or less promising futures that it is shaping. 5.1.  AN UNFEASIBLE ANTI-INSTITUTIONALISM?2 In her article “Presupposing Equality: The Trouble with Rancière’s Axiomatic Approach,” Ella Myers takes up and argues once again in favor of an interpretation of Rancière that has become almost a commonplace: Rancière’s conceptualization of axiomatic equality, which identifies it both with an occasional, disruptive event and a universal but disavowed condition, presents a frustrating impasse for those seeking to instantiate equality, however imperfectly, in our everyday political and social lives. Moreover, the formulation of equality that I illuminate and question is not an isolated concept; rather, it expresses Rancière’s’ general aversion to institutional politics. His account of equality as axiomatic is embedded in a framework that largely identifies “order” with hierarchy and “organization” with domination. (Myers 2016, 46–47)

This reading relies on a series of assumptions that constitute a dichotomous understanding of emancipation in Rancière, according to which: (1) police and politics are two different ontological fields; (2) the former would be the field of domination, (3) while the latter would be a completely excedent space of ephemeral interruption of those forms of domination; (4) any order of arrangement, organization, or institutionalization would involve forms of hierarchy and domination; (5) so that politics, in its autonomy, would have to be considered an anti-institutional activity.3 As I have already argued in this book, taking Rancière’s aesthetic-­ cartographic method seriously makes it possible to challenge this dichotomous reading and its assumptions, emphasizing that: (a) politics and police are not two different ontological fields, but two logics that cut across the heterogeneity of the social field and make up its conflictive arrangements; (b) the police is not the terrain of domination, but an unstable logic whose effects are subjection and inequality, but that can be divided and reused to give way to torsions, gaps that can produce emancipatory forms and effects; (c) forms of verification of equality can occur through different dispositifs

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(of antagonism, negotiation, visible yet ephemeral interruption, and lasting but not very visible alteration) that intersect and feed into one another. We also saw (d) that these emancipatory practices can make use of given institutions, such as recognized rights, in order to claim unrecognized rights arising from their forms of experimentation and to demand the right to participate of unacknowledged political actors. And it became clear that these practices can create popular institutions (assemblies, councils, platforms that gather several different movements) that, by making use of given institutions and imagining inexistent ones, allow them to create other scenarios for discussion, visibilize problems and demands not recognized in the grammar established to decide on the political. In this sense, Rancière states, I do not seek politics in the simple specific action of the group manifesting itself, For me, there is no such thing as politics on the one hand and the police on the other, but rather stagings of their relation. This staging can be a political philosophy that creates a gap-interval (écart) between the just and the unjust, or between governing and being governed, which the scene itself displays symmetrically. It can be a constitution or a government practice that assumes equality in the very exercise of inequality; it can be a social struggle that combines the affirmation of the irreducibly egalitarian with the petition for a certain privilege in the existing social order. (Rancière 2009a, 383)

What matters is, once again, the gap-interval, the écart, and the heterological crossings that it entails between the logics of politics and the police. Moreover, in the previous chapter, we showed that disagreement practices that build a visible scene of confrontation with the modes of organizing and regulating life do not have to be staged by egalitarian movements only in ephemeral moments of interruption, such as strikes, blockades, or occupation of public squares. It can also occur in forms of organization, some of them long-term, that presuppose and claim the equal capacity of anyone to attend to the common. Perhaps, Myers loses sight of the fact that equality is not an immaterial axiom that could only be verified in ephemeral actions, lacking effectiveness, or otherwise it would betray itself in the solidity of realizations. Rather, as I suggested in chapter 2 through the figures of Gauny, Jacotot, and Irene, it is an incorporeal assumption that must be verified in the materiality of each practice, because the forms in which it can occur cannot be foreseen or closed off. It is an always absent yet verifiable assumption, with very material and concrete effects, as I expect to have already demonstrated: Organization is of no interest in itself. The question lies, rather, in the problem of why and what one should organize for, and where the political nodes are. In my view, political nodes always refer to the capacity of those who have no



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part, that is, to the manifestation of the capacity of anyone. Politics is linked to this universalizing the capacity of anyone. And, in this sense, what needs to be extended, what is central to organization, is ultimately that capacity to multiply the demonstration produced in a determined time and place: everyone is capable of political action. (Rancière 2009a, 382–83; my emphases)

To say that an organization is of no political interest in itself is evidently very different from saying that the organizational dimension is completely alien to politics or that it betrays it. Myers, nevertheless, pigeonholes Rancière into this scheme, which the author has repeatedly disputed. In his words, “the issue is not, like before, spontaneity or organization” (Rancière 2009a, 384). In fact, “organization is, undoubtedly, necessary” (383). But that which characterizes an emancipatory practice is the fact that it reconfigures “forms of visibility of the common” and not that which defines a certain group, its cohesive power, its associative strength per se, “as a certain type of interiority” (384). Because “it takes time and work for individual bodies or configurations of bodies to re-qualify themselves and the situations they are in” (384), and this depends not merely on the cohesion of a group but on the forms of manifestation, intervention, and relation to the world and to the others that it invents. For this reason, political nodes in an organization make possible “the creation of other autonomous pockets of power and expression, of other ways of using the capacities of the anonymous” (Laclau and Rancière 2015). Thus, Rancière cannot be more emphatic in positioning himself against spontaneity and the evental-ephemeral character that is often attributed to his understanding of political action: I think we have to go beyond the opposition between emergence of events, on the one hand, and organization, on the other, as if this were something solid and established. An event is a transformation of the common fabric, while the question of organization is that of knowing how to extend that transformation of the visible, of the sensible, of what is revealed as possible by those hitherto considered incapable. (Rancière 2009a, 495)

What characterizes the interruption caused by political action is not its pure irruption, its radical alterity regarding what is considered solid and established, and what defines it is not merely a certain instability, fluidity, and difference that challenges stability and solidity. The interruption has to do with its capacity to alter a distribution of the common, making use of elements that are part of that very distribution, through operations of torsion, disassembly, and reassembly, as we have been insisting on. Moreover, organization does not have to be thought as that which fixes, solidifies, and simply paralyzes, but rather, as arrangements that may even serve to extend and multiply the affirmation of a common capacity. These considerations can also be taken

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into account when thinking of Rancière’s understanding of the institution and its relation to emancipatory practices: A political institution in this sense is an institution that has as its goal an increase in the power of anyone at all. [. . .] I am not against institutions per se, but I am against the “spontaneity vs. organization” claptrap [that Myers and others attribute to Rancière!]. I am against all that comes along and redirects the idea of an institution based on liberty and equality towards the idea of an institution within the state power game as it is defined. (Rancière 2016c, 122–23)

This text proves how problematic it is to insist on Rancière’s anti-­ institutionalism, and, at the same time, opens up possibilities for thinking institutions differently, that is, not as simple frameworks or rules that fix, regulate, control, and inhibit, capacities, establishing stable boundaries for them, but as assemblages that can contribute to “increasing the power of anyone,” to the multiplication and growth of the capacities of bodies “wherever this growth may be affirmed” (Rancière 2009a, 496–97). The text also suggests that this emancipatory dimension of institutions cannot be recognized when the latter are conceived as a given state configuration. It is essential to be meticulous here: Rancière is not suggesting here a necessary antagonism between popular and state institutions, as if he thought the state as a homogenous entity. What he is saying is that those forms of instituting freedom and equality cannot be reduced to an established state configuration, precisely because those forms are confronting, challenging, and reconfiguring the latter. However, as we saw in chapter 4 when referring to the issue of rights, “a constitution or a government practice” (Rancière 2009a, 382–83) can be used to divide, unfold, and torsion them, depriving them of their character of mere datum, in order to experiment with them and create egalitarian practices and institutions. One could then say that there are state configurations that are more inscribed, exposed, and receptive to forms of equality, so that they could be considered better than others, although no state assemblage can be considered emancipatory per se. And it is also possible to affirm that Rancière is not at all indifferent to the dimension of the state, though, of course, it makes a difference whether we are speaking of a neoliberal or a socialist state, or a state under the rule of law. The idea is not to affirm that all cats are grey in the dark night of power: of course there are differences and they affect the resources available for emancipatory practices, though every state involves a certain oligarchic structure. Thus, in the following section and on the basis of Rancière’s understanding of democracy, I will pursue a double movement: on the one hand, the way in which democratic struggles mobilize and produce egalitarian arrangements from/in the given state institutions, and, on the other



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hand, the extent to which emancipatory practices and arrangements have to be considered as autonomous with respect to any state configuration.

5.2.  EXCESSIVE DEMOCRACY AND AUTONOMY OF EMANCIPATION PRACTICES The term democracy, then, does not strictly designate either a form of society or a form of government [. . .]. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The “power of the people” is therefore necessarily also heterotopic to inegalitarian society and to oligarchic government. (Rancière 2006b, 52)

Rancière polemically takes up the Greek notion of “democracy” in order to confront its consensual appropriations and highlight that this notion refers, above all, to a power of appearance of the people as divided between those that are counted and those that are not counted as part of the common, or, in Roman terms, between populus and plebs. And, as a people divided “the demos attributes to itself as its proper lot” (as plebs) “the equality that belongs to all citizens” (as populus) (Rancière 1996, 22). For this reason, democracy is not a form of society but rather a way of dividing a social body that evinces how it counts and what is miscounted. Thus, Rancière also displaces the notion of democracy from the idea of government of the majority to the affirmation of the capacity of anyone to participate in public affairs. In fact, as Josiah Ober has shown, it is significant that the Greek suffix in the term “demo-cracy” is kratos rather than archein. While the first indicates strength, empowerment, a “capacity to do things,” and, in particular, an “activated political capacity,” the second is used to refer to a “concern for the control of a (pre-existing) constitutional apparatus” (Ober 2008, 6). Two assumptions that Rancière has discussed are mobilized here: on the one hand, the idea that a vertical government structure that entails command and obedience involves inegalitarian relations between a minority and a majority, between those who command and those who obey, between those who make decisions and those who must accept and implement them. On the other hand is the idea that a democratic manifestation interrupts the inegalitarian structure by showing that those relations of command deny the equality of intelligence, without which that structure cannot function,4 since it requires the understanding, cooperation, and following of rules by those subjected to it. But this does not mean that a political action must exclude all forms of verticality, as in Arendt, since organizations usually include certain vertical

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relations. It is worth reiterating that in these organizations, the political has to do with the fact that amidst those relations of government, and not in them or because of them, it is possible to assert a common power of the anonymous. It could also be said that political organizations are concerned precisely with making their vertical forms more egalitarian through different resources: rotation of government posts, random eligibility, eligibility of anyone for those positions. And these political organizations would have to affirm the contingency and instability of government positions, recognizing that functions are established in view of certain strategic objectives and not by virtue of a difference in capacities that destines some to govern and some to be governed. For this same reason, the idea is not to invalidate democratic struggles that have produced more egalitarian institutions and forms of government. We could think here of the emancipatory struggles that took place during the French Revolution or in Haiti, for example, whose effect was the transformation of state structures and forms of government. However, what is democratic about them is the power of common intervention that they visibilized, verified, and managed to inscribe in those structures. The revolutionary in these cases is the radical break of a given symbolic order brought about by an unprecedented verification of a collective actor’s claims, and not its capacity per se to institute a new state, structure of government, or popular institution. In fact, according to Rancière, reducing these practices to their capacity to constitute a new government structure can make us lose sight of their autonomy regarding any state configuration and hence the impossibility of their being guaranteed by any institution (whether state or popular). Such autonomy has to do precisely with the capacity of these practices to divert both the government and society from themselves; that is, it refers to the excedence of these practices with respect to any already constituted order, which they have to divide since it can always give rise to the miscount that wrongs equality. And, for the same reason, it refers to the interventions and egalitarian effects that these practices may produce in given (social and state) institutions, thus exceeding them. As I have argued elsewhere (Quintana 2014c), this excedence has to do, first of all, with the irreducible character of political conflict, with the manner in which it exceeds the solutions of “good government” and cannot, therefore, be resolved or eliminated due to the wrong to equality that can be produced in any order of sense and perception. Second—and in the relation to the above—at stake is the excedence of the demos with respect to any possible representation or “account” of it (in terms of state, nation, cultural identity, public opinion, etc.), given that it is always a miscount or an incomplete count. But, at the same time, this excess has to do with the “excess of equality,” with the fact that equality can never be fully realized, although it can be, more or less, inscribed in rights, laws, and institutions, despite never being completely guaranteed by them.



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As a matter of fact, the constitutions of modern regimes considered democratic try to include this excess by means of the principle of popular sovereignty, which, in a contradictory operation, attempts to transform the ungrounded principle of politics—in the anarchic sense (without arkhè)—of the equality of anyone with everyone (Rancière 2006b, 76), into an arkhè. Thus, “the fiction of the sovereign people” makes it possible to establish a “linkage between governmental politics and political practices,” which can challenge government logic and its alleged representativeness, by “dividing the people [and] constituting a people that supplements the one that is inscribed in constitutions, represented by parliamentarians, and embodied in the State” (Rancière 2006b, 76). Thus, despite the fact that they try to immunize themselves against it, the so-called democratic regimes would have to accept that the principle that legitimizes them is also the constant acceptance of their unstable legitimacy: I don’t believe that there are original presentations, nor an original “people,” nor an original popular will—be it voluntary or homogenous. [. . .] But there will always be people who take to the streets and say “we are the people” and this for me is democracy. Not in terms of all the people being united there in a literal sense, but rather that a “figure of the people” presents itself there. A “figure of the people” is the enactment of the capacity that does not belong to any particular group [. . .] but rather to the capacity of everybody, of anybody. (Laclau and Rancière 2015)

In a recent text dedicated to the formula “we, the people” and its performative effects, Judith Butler makes some considerations that point in this direction, in order to accentuate the excessive dimension that is at stake here. In her reading, if popular sovereignty, in all its indeterminacy, can never be fully contained in representative institutions or electoral processes, there is necessarily a separation between the people and their representatives. And “something remains untranslatable about popular sovereignty since it can surely bring down regimes as well as elect them” (Butler 2016, 50). The fact that popular sovereignty can legitimize as well as challenge representative institutions shows that this principle exceeds every established legal institution. Moreover, the conditions of a democratic government depend on this excessive power, which Butler—­ converging here with Rancière—provocatively calls an “anarchist energy” or “permanent principle of revolution” (51). Thus, more than a unifying principle translatable into the idea of a representable general will, it is a principle that can neither be fully represented nor translated in a political order, which not only grants legitimacy but also delegitimizes, and that even legitimizes the possibility of delegitimization (I shall revisit this in section 5).

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It is due to this excess, in all of its convergent registers, that no institution can guarantee or represent democratic equality fully, although I insist, some may inscribe it more than others, although, in fact, the deviations produced by democratic struggles in those established institutions have to do with those inscriptions. Before continuing to reflect on the issue of excess and arguing for the necessary autonomy of emancipation practices, let us dwell for a moment on the matter of inscription. Because, in Rancière’s words, democratic manifestations “have an effect on the institutional mechanisms of politics and use whatever mechanisms they choose. They produce inscriptions of equality and they argue about existing inscriptions” (Rancière 1999, 100). Let us consider, for example, a scene from Antiquity that Rancière refers to in different texts: the reform carried out by Cleisthenes (Rancière 2006b, 44; 2009a, 242). By breaking up the existing, heterogeneous, geographically separate territorial divisions, and defining citizenship on the basis of belonging to those diverse units, the reform aimed at preventing the dominance of the given aristocratic clans and separating citizenship from family-tribe origin (Quintana 2013a, 149–50). On the basis of that reform, democracy emerged as a rupture in the order of affiliation and a fracture in the given distribution of the people, thus allowing for its duplication as an “invention of a topography of the same and of the other that breaks (brise) identitarian relations” (Rancière, in Poirier 2000). That institutional reform made it possible to “place a world within another,” to inscribe, in the midst of an unequal social space, an equality that institutes new relations, an inscription in which the kratos of the demos can appear. To formulate in such a way that the paradox inherent here is evident: an institutional reform makes possible the institution of forms of appearing in which the unrepresentable character of the demos is evinced, as well as the fact that it cannot be fully counted by any institutional configuration (Quintana 2013a, 150). Thus, inscription is not an “inert” object, as Myers seems to think (cf. Myers 2016, 59). It is exactly the opposite: what that notion indicates is that these inscriptions are very much alive, yet virtual, gaps-intervals, produced within institutions, in their midst, as forms of spacing and countering inequalities in the established institutions. They are also indeterminate and incorporeal outlines that, due to the indeterminacy with which they conceive equality, can be appropriated and mobilized by egalitarian struggles other than those that gave rise to them. Now then, returning to the question of excess, it is precisely because of it that Rancière can state: Democracy can never be identified with a juridico-political form. This does not mean it is indifferent to such forms. It means that the power of the people is



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always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, because these forms cannot function without referring in the last instance to that power of incompetents who form the basis of and negate the power of the competent, to this equality which is necessary to the very functioning of the inegalitarian machine. Beyond, because the very forms that inscribe this power are constantly reabsorbed, through the play itself of the governmental machine, into the “natural” logic of titles to govern, which is a logic of indistinction of the public and the private. (Rancière 2006b, 54–55)

Only by decontextualizing can one infer what Myers (2016) does from the first sentence of the text: “Rancière makes no secret of his hostility to institutionalization, declaring that [. . .] democracy ‘can never be identified with a juridico-political form’ ” (56). What the text actually affirms when emphasizing that emancipation practices are beneath and beyond juridicopolitical forms is nothing but the excess of the former with respect to the latter. In fact, those forms are not indifferent: “The rights of association, assembly and demonstration permit the organization of democratic life, that is, a life which is independent of the State sphere” (Rancière 2006b, 74), and are, therefore, fundamental. In other words, juridico-political forms, not per se, but when used politically, make it possible to display the autonomous life of emancipation practices, which, at the same time, ensures the political vitality of those forms and their capacity to keep allowing for emancipatory uses in the democratic struggles they in fact arise from (Rancière 2006b, 54–55). Moreover, These forms of emergence have an effect on the institutional mechanisms of politics and use whatever mechanisms they choose [. . .]. And so they are in no way oblivious to the existence of elected assemblies, institutional guarantees of freedom of speech and expression, state control mechanisms. They see in these the conditions for being exercised and in turn modify them. But they do not identify with them. And still less can they be identified with individuals’ ways of being. (Rancière 1999, 100–1)

Thus, juridico-political mechanisms are not merely resources but even important conditions for political action, won in democratic struggles. Nevertheless, despite this, the forms, dispositifs, and practices of emancipation cannot be identified with these mechanisms. This is precisely why Rancière underscores their autonomy. As a matter of fact, the use of these mechanisms in emancipatory practices implies that they are assumed as conditions that never coincide with the society, justice, equality, and freedom they claim to represent. Thus is asserted the gap between one and the other, the excess of the latter with respect to the former, as conditions, even, of the political

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power of those institutional resources. Hence the paradox emphasized in Disagreement: At the time the institutions of parliamentary representation were being contested, when the notion that these were “mere forms” held sway, they were nonetheless the object of a vastly superior militant vigilance. We have seen generations of militant socialists and communists battle fiercely for a constitution, rights, institutions, and institutional mechanisms that they otherwise claimed expressed the power of the bourgeoisie and of capital. Today the situation is the reverse and the victory of so-called formal democracy is accompanied by a noticeable disaffection with regard to its forms. (Rancière 1999, 97)

Whenever the gap between these juridico-political forms and the ideals of justice of emancipatory movements was recognized for whatever reason (suspicion regarding the merely formal character of the juridical forms of the rule of law and their being taken over by the denounced powers of capital and the bourgeoisie), there was greater vigilance and effort to transform them and make them more egalitarian, even while making use of them. In contrast, today, when the consensus is that the defeat of communisms means the unquestionable victory of liberal democracy, it is assumed that the law can represent society and realize democratic ideals. This, however, means that the gaps have been closed—though this can never be achieved completely— those that allow for the political use of right in order to construct egalitarian arguments, for the division of right as a heterogeneous resource in order to make it something more than legal mechanisms for social regulation. This juridicalization and depoliticization of right causes the weakening of social struggles, and this weakening has made possible the dismantling of conquests won in democratic conflicts, such as social rights, guarantees for strikes, protests, etc., which, as we saw, has been occurring in the consensual state. The dismantling of those conquests is also a defeat for political-social struggle, a defeat whose other face is the loss of vitality of representative institutions, which, as we have also seen throughout this book, is quite visible in today’s consensual regimes. The above considerations allows us to distinguish Rancière’s understanding of democracy from that of others with which he is often associated, such as Miguel Abensour’s idea of “insurgent democracy” (which the author himself has linked to Rancière [see Abensour 2012, 35]). Underscoring that difference will allow us to point out other important distinctions: Insurgent democracy means the community of the all-ones [. . .], and, more specifically, if we bear in mind the dynamic dimension of political things, the resistance of the all ones to being transformed into the all-One, as if one of the



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functions of insurgency were to block, detain, the persistently threatening shift of the community of the all ones toward the unifying form of the all-One, which denies plurality, the ontological condition of plurality. (Abensour 2012, 37)

Influenced by Arendt, Abensour thinks that (1) politics is the sphere of plurality, of a way of being with others in which relations of non-domination can be developed, as well as non-totalizing forms that work against domination by blocking or reducing the states’ power of totalization (Abensour 2012, 34). According to this, (2) the state is an organizational, unifying, and integrating form “susceptible of occupying the place of the action of the people, only to end up opposing it” (Abensour 2012, 33), which means it is basically a structure of domination. (3) The emancipatory character of political action has to do, then, with its capacity to situate “the conflict outside the State” (41), as a work of division and dispersion that asserts plurality as the ontological condition of human life (Abensour 2012, 42). On the basis of the path followed thus far in this book, the difference between these assumptions and Rancière’s point of view is evident. In fact, although Rancière believes that democracy, as an egalitarian political activity, is autonomous with respect to the state, its field of action is not an ontological sphere different from that of the state, nor is its activity characterized merely by a movement of de-totalization and dispersion. Moreover, for Rancière, the state is not simply a unifying, totalizing, integrating force, although there are state configurations that might act mainly in that manner; neither is it a machine that, like a “cold monster,” imposes “its rigid order on the life of society” (cf. Rancière 1999, 29). It is rather a heterogeneous assemblage in which vertical forms of social organization prevail, and which, at different levels (of economic and social management, legislative representation, legal decision), deprive bodies of their possibility to intervene and decide on matters of their concern, even in state configurations that try to be more participatory. Thus, democratic political struggles can be conceived as contrary to that tendency to depoliticization and, therefore, as counter-state. However—and this is fundamental to mark the difference with autonomist anti-statism—they do so in a movement of spacing, within both the state and society, which divides, fractures, and alters by creating gaps-interstices in them. Thus, for Rancière, emancipation practices do not aim at overthrowing the state or creating communities outside the state, independent of its power. Their objective is to affirm a power of organization, intervention, and decision, through very different practices that can make use (and usually do so, because we live in state configurations) of state mechanisms to assert, extend, and multiply that power. Given the above, we can also say that for Rancière emancipation practices are not merely reactive, defensive, or dispersive, but rather

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experimental, creative, and capable of reconfiguring a field of experience. Moreover, in his view, the state is not only made up of police logics but also—more or less—inscribed or constituted by political logics that can be mobilized into emancipatory struggles. And police logics also cut across bodies and social formations in general, and not just the state. Therefore, politics always emerges in the police establishment, in order to destabilize and reconfigure it. All of this entails rethinking the work of revolution, as I suggested earlier, instead of abandoning it or falling into a mere state-centered reformism. It also implies understanding the temporality of the political differently, beyond reformism’s temporality of stages and beyond the all or nothing of traditional revolutionary thought. Although Abensour’s anti-statism does not lead him to an anti-institutionalist position but to another reading of institutions, grounded in the idea of non-domination as de-totalization (Abensour 2012, 44), the opposition he establishes between politics (as the sphere of non-domination) and state (as the field of domination) can lead to an opposition between action (spontaneous, horizontal, fluid) and organization/ institution (as the static, stabilizing order of capture), which Rancière has criticized. Likewise, this makes it possible to go beyond the usual dichotomy in the discussion of democracy between representative and direct democracy. In fact, although in several texts Rancière (2006b) argues that “representation was never a system invented to compensate for the growth of populations,” but “an oligarchic form,” “of State functioning initially founded on the privilege of ‘natural’ elites” (53–54) (landowners, males, white people, or, like today, experts in technocracy). However, This is not to say that we must oppose the virtues of direct democracy to the mediations and usurpations of representation, or arraign the misleading appearances of formal democracy before the effectivity of real democracy. It is just as false to identify democracy with representation as it is to make the one the refutation of the other. (Rancière 2006b, 53–54)

The problem with representative models of democracy is that they lose sight of the heterogeneity of what goes by the name of “representative democracy,” that is, the heterological character of the juridico-political forms of constitutions and state laws. These are forms that establish the common and the political capacity of those who can participate in it, but that also have been diverted and inscribed in different ways by democratic struggles (Rancière 2006b, 53–54). Advocates of direct democracy (as real democracy) as opposed to representative democracy also lose sight of the fact that there is no real people that express themselves in direct forms



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of manifestation, but always a divided people that can assert conflict, reconfigure themselves, and reinvent the common, thanks to the juridicopolitical forms of representation they have conquered while never identifying with them. 5.3.  EMANCIPATORY INSTITUTIONS? Could we then say that it does make sense to speak of emancipatory institutions, based on Rancière? We could initially say yes, but with the following caveats: there can be emancipatory popular institutions provided that they make it possible to create, affirm, extend, and multiply the power of any body to intervene in the common. And there can even be state institutions that foster—more or less—the deployment of that common capacity, despite the fact that they cannot be considered inherently emancipatory because, as state institutions, they include mechanisms to regulate the formation and deployment of that common capacity. But, what does extending, multiplying, or fostering that common capacity by instituting “freedom” and “equality” involve? We can begin finding our way regarding this question, which has not been directly addressed by Rancière, on the basis of some clues he has provided here and there in different interviews. First, the author has suggested that the issue of extending forms of emancipation across institutions involves rethinking political temporality, beyond the two types of traditional temporality: that of a homogeneous time, which assumes that every struggle must necessarily be translated into the given institutional arrangements, thus merely reproducing the time of domination (the typical “reformist” position), on the one hand, and, on the other, “the temporality of revolutionary strategy,” which assumes equality as an objective to be gradually realized in history, subordinating the present to a future understood in strategic or functionalist terms (cf. Quintana 2013a, 146–47). However, in contrast to this, equality is taken as an assumption, then “what is important is that which, at every moment, allows for the presentation, the declaration, the embodiment of a power of equality, of the power of anyone” (Rancière 2009a, 496). And this involves “thinking a temporality of the increase of the potentialities of the present” (Rancière 2009a, 496). In other words, the idea is to potentiate a capacity that we could call “equal liberty,”5 because the verification of equal capacity means the formation of a mobility, a transformative power, a de-subjecting, purposeful, and experimental impulse. To extend is also to establish new paths, making use of knots that can be woven in instituted spaces, experiences, and forms in order to question, on the basis of those conditions, that which reproduces relations of inequality in

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that which is instituted. The following considerations by Rancière regarding the effectiveness of democratic struggles can also provide clues about what emancipatory institutions would involve: For me, there is one fundamental criterion for the effectiveness of political activity, and that is whether that activity creates, enables and extends the institutionalization of the conditions themselves for its being carried out. This means effectiveness is always subjective first of all: it’s an increase in the power of the political subject as such. That said, this increase in power also shows up in the readjustment of the balance of power as it is registered in state institutions and social institutions. [. . .] We know very well that all rights are limited by the material possibility of benefiting by them, but the principal right is the right to be a political actor without fear. The fact that I can go down into the street with the idea in mind that the most probable risk is not that they’ll shoot at me but that they might knock me around a bit and send me to gaol, is very important. Beyond the purely material aspect, the creation of conditions whereby the people are allowed to be present as such, as different from the people embodied in the state, is a fundamental criterion of political effectiveness. There are also criteria for what a political struggle might produce in terms of equality in living standards [. . .]. I’m not at all into the discourse of these people who say that all that is never anything more than a trap, that if there exist social rights, a welfare system, it’s solely to railroad the working class and wipe out any resistance [. . .]. Conversely, there has always been a correlation between these extensions of a fabric of relative equality and any extension of ways of exercising the capacity of each and every person. The effects of the political struggle can be seen simultaneously in such subjective growth and in the conditions for the equality of rights, and also a certain number of minimal conditions required for existence. (Rancière 2016b, 156–57)

It is interesting to observe that this text highlights the effects of emancipatory practices in the field of institutions, and that it suggests that a way of “measuring” the effectiveness of emancipatory practices is to consider the manner in which they allow for the creation and expansion, in an institutional dimension, of “the conditions themselves for its being carried out,” that is, the conditions for an autonomous political activity with respect to the established state sphere. These are conditions that make it possible for emancipatory political subjects to appear, although their emergence cannot be guaranteed in any case. It should be noted that the text suggests the possibility of institutionalization of these conditions, or, to put it in the paradoxical terms involved here, the possibility of institutionalization of that which allows for the emergence of a power that no institution can guarantee or fully realize. They are conditions that “make possible the presence of the people,” in its inevitable division, as populus and as plebs: a presence different from that of the people embodied in the state. Hence the paradoxical character of such emancipatory



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institutional conditions, which are open to the emergence of those who have not been counted or represented by them, and which could affirm social conflict, channeling and countering its violent effects, instead if denying it. This is why Rancière often insists on the fact that they must be institutions that permit the expansion and multiplication of the forms of manifestation of that division, through practice of political subjectivization. However, he does not develop further a different understanding of institution, which is perhaps necessary to think about the way in which emancipation practices could be extended. In any case, they can be conceived as conditions that are exposed to the reconfiguration of the boundaries of what they themselves have established as common. In Hatred of Democracy (2006b), Rancière points out that democratic struggles have led to “a double movement of transgressing [the given institutional] limits” (55): on the one hand, they have made it possible to expand and reconfigure an established public space, that is, a state space with its boundaries of the common, in order to extend and multiply equality and open up the public sphere to other domains of common life. Historically, this has had two consequences: “the recognition, as equals and as political subjects, of those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings” (women, Afro-descendants, animals) and “the recognition of the public character of types of spaces and relations [. . .],” “and institutions regarded as private” (work conditions, health, education, retirement) (55–56). Moreover, since this enlarged public sphere involves boundaries that distribute the common (in the sense of delimiting and dividing it), it can always be confronted by other forms of reinvention of the common, by other democratic struggles aimed at challenging and reconfiguring the boundaries of a given public space. On the other hand, because the established forms of the public, for example, certain social rights, can be continuously privatized or limited to certain sectors, actors, and places, there is a need for mechanisms to resist that privatization. Therefore, in many cases, democratic struggles also aim at “reaffirming the belonging of anyone and everyone to that incessantly privatized public sphere” (Rancière 2006b, 57–58). The text is also interesting because it makes evident that those who denounce the falsity of rights and downplay the radical nature of social struggles actually contribute to consensual depoliticization. Thus, they not only lose sight of how these institutional conditions can give rise to a “fabric of relative equality” that can be more favorable for affirming the capacity of anyone but also fail to grasp the very material and corporeal dimension at stake in social rights and how they can foster minimum conditions for existence. Judith Butler has recently highlighted this corporeal dimension of social rights and of the claims demanding their enforcement wherever they have

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been dismantled or not recognized. Moreover, for Butler, there is an interesting correlation between the way bodies manifest themselves to make those claims and the type of demands they express. These are embodied manifestations whose enunciations are not reduced to speech acts, as they can also occur through songs, music, beating pots and pans, or tearing down a wall, that is, through gestures in which “a corporeal condition of plurality is indexed” (Butler 2016, 58). These are embodied enunciations in and through which demands are made that have to do with the corporeality of those manifesting themselves (Butler 2016, 57–58). In fact, the embodied character of the demands is fundamental in order to understand the type of demands being made. Among these demands, one often finds those involving minimum social conditions for bodies: the need for “food and shelter, protection from injury and violence, the freedom to move, to work, to have access to health care” (Butler 2016, 59). Thus bodies appear before others, demanding conditions that express their relationality and dependence, conditions that are demanded precisely as conditions for existence, without which a dignified life is impossible. That is why they never struggle for specific requirements, but for living conditions that make life more livable (Butler 2016, 60–61). These considerations certainly pose the question of what it is that makes life livable, without having to postulate a new ideal of the human that establishes boundaries of inclusion and exclusion and forms of normalization. In this sense, it is essential to recognize something I have emphasized throughout the book: the fact that the life of bodies constitutes a complex weave of relations among the human, the animal, and technology, in their interdependency, which, in turn, is expressed in the social demands bodies make in view of consensualism’s conditions of precarization: “Bodies assemble precisely to show that they are bodies, and to let it be known politically what it means to persist as a body in this world, and what requirements must be met for bodies to survive, and what conditions make a bodily life, which is the only life we have, finally livable” (Butler 2016, 63). Thus, it is not as abstract subjects of rights that bodies take to the streets, but as bodies that enact those rights in corporeal practices, such as those I discussed in the previous chapter. However, they do not make those demands as mere bodies, as a long philosophical tradition has thought, but as bodies that refuse to have their lives reduced to plain survival, that is, as bodies capable of acting politically while surviving and that build a political space by showing that they are never merely unitary given bodies, but assemblages, networks of relations. In fact, at stake in these demands, configured as embodied work, is the political reinvention of the question of what should be asserted as the common.



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5.4.  INSTITUTIONS OF THE COMMON? Subjectivation forges a new common by undoing the (consensual, existing) common [. . .] it forges the common by putting in common what is not common, by declaring that private individuals are actors of the common [. . .]. What I call consensus is the attempt to undo the dissensual fabric of the common by reducing the common to simple rules of inclusion, even though the political common is in fact made from the processes of including the excluded and putting in common the not common. (Rancière 2017b, locations 3625 and 3642).

The above words aptly summarize Rancière’s conception of the common, which has been appearing gradually along the path we have covered thus far. As is the case for other contemporary thinkers—as different as Deleuze, Nancy, Esposito, Laclau, and Mouffe, which clearly differ from Rancière— at stake here is the need to question essentialist views of the common that conceive it as something given, on the basis of a “homogeneous identity,” a “compact totality,” a “unity with no fissures.” In Rancière’s case, the idea is to rethink the common as a process of division and disassembly of what is given as common insofar as it is public, in order to make evident the noncommon, produced and fixed by that established public space. We have also seen that this process has a reconfiguration dimension, because it allows for the assertion as common of subjects, problems, and spaces that were not considered as such in that space. In this sense, the common refers to a certain way of acting together, to collective practices and forms of organization that produce subjects, arrangements, common things not given as such prior to those collective practices. But this also means that there is not a social and political space that can be considered the common space, since due to its boundaries of sense and perception, every social space also produces the non-common. This is why the common is produced and reinvented not through composition and synthesis, but rather through division and reconfiguration by means of visible actions and everyday practices that make it possible for bodies to have another type of experience among themselves. Nevertheless, the common is only produced in processes of political subjectivization that affirm the capacity of anyone to intervene in the affairs that matter to them, and not in representation arenas that seek or can give rise to consensus, in the broadest sense of the term as acceptance of a certain framework within which one is included. Because the common is clearly not consensus, the common is not produced by a simple operation of inclusion in a certain framework—be it assumed as given or as constructed. The common refers to an operation of experimentation with a framework, reconfiguring it so that it includes what it had excluded, and thus ceases to be what it was.

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For all of these reasons and because the state, at least as it configured itself in modernity, requires stabilized command-obedience positions that dispossess some of the power to intervene in matters that concern everyone, it can be considered neither a node of articulation that produces the common nor a common space. Moreover, as we had anticipated, the common is not the public (as assumed in some state-centered views), but rather an operation that makes it possible to destabilize and reconfigure a certain public space. Neither is it what has been established as an ancestral organic community with no divisions or antagonisms, but the manner in which that community can gradually come to question its boundaries to make other worlds visible in the given world. 5.4.1.  Beyond the Res Publica Let us dwell for a moment on the distinction between the common and the public since it allows us to establish important differences regarding republicanism, as a view interested precisely in answering the question that concerns us in this part of the chapter. In the case of republicanism, the response provided is based on the idea of certain institutions of the public, of the res publica, which Rancière has criticized harshly: For the word “republic” cannot merely signify the equal rule of law for all. “Republic” is an equivocal term, wrought by the tension implied in the wish to include the excess of politics in the instituted forms of the political. Including this excess means two contradictory things: to entitle it by fixing it in the texts and the forms of community institutions, but also to eliminate it by identifying the laws of the State with the moral values of a society. On the one hand, the modern republic is identified with the reign of a law emanating from a popular will which includes the excess of the demos. But, on the other, including this excess requires a regulating principle: the republic must have not only laws but republican morals too. The republic, then, is a regime of homogeneity between State institutions and societal mores. (Rancière 2006b, 63–64)

Such a statement might seem shocking and extremely simplifying to anyone knowledgeable of the complex and plural tradition of republicanism. How can Rancière, in a single brush stroke, assimilate such different proposals as those deriving from classical republicanism (Cicero, the anti-federalists, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Tocqueville), the more recent appropriations of the so-called neo-republicanism (by authors like Sandel, Skinner, and Pettit), conflictual republicanism (Lefort, Pocock, Arendt), and its plebeian version (Muraca and Rinesi 2010; Cadahia 2018)? Moreover, how can ­Rancière relate all those versions—which, in fact he does not mention explicitly, except for those of Arendt and Lefort—to the secular French republic



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he is considering, through the hidden link he traces with Plato’s republic? Nevertheless, beyond the disparity of proposals and their assumptions, it is possible to envision a guiding thread that cuts across that dissimilar tradition, or, at least, its most notable expressions, a thread that might resonate with the above-cited text, as I shall show below. In any case, it is worth clarifying that the purpose of my considerations is not to justify Rancière’s position regarding republicanism but to provide some parameters for understanding it and making it possible to draw interesting inferences for the matter at hand. As highlighted by Argentinean researcher Claudia Hilb, following Pocock (1975, 157, 183–85), according to Machiavelli, a “convinced republican,” The Republic is the virtuous regime in the classical sense of civic humanism. That is, the Republic is the regime that makes possible the realization of vivere civile, a form of life dedicated to civic interest and to the citizens’ exercise of political activity. And it is in this life dedicated to action, made possible by the Republic, that human beings can achieve the highest values they can aspire to. (Hilb 2000, 5)

The above text refers to one of the favorite topics of classical republicanism, the emphasis on civic virtue, and more or less explicitly shows some of its assumptions: the idea of a human ideal that coincides with the formation and deployment of citizen virtue, understood as a condition for the development of the other virtues; the identification of that virtue with a citizen conduct committed to the common good, that is, the good as defined within the Republic; and the normative assumption that the latter is not only the regime “most adequate to human moral nature,” since it allows for realization of human virtue, but also the regime “most akin to the nature of things political” (Hilb 2000, 130). But to say that there are “things political,” a specific sphere of the political, presupposes very stable and well-defined boundaries between the political and the nonpolitical, between what can be part of the res publica and what cannot. Additionally, such an affirmation loses sight of the manner in which political conflict, as we have insisted, has to do precisely with the destabilization of boundaries. Thus, while for Machiavelli the specific field of the political is that of division and conflict, it is a limited acknowledgment of conflict that is resolved by assuming that the republic is the regime that can best recognize and institutionalize it (see Hilb 2000, 130). I shall return to this claim later, but now I would like to discuss the ethical-political understanding mobilized by republicanism, together with its normative assumption. In fact, various authors have insisted on the centrality of the notion of civic virtue in republicanism—whether understood in more substantial or more procedural terms (Sandel 1996, 26–27, 290; Habermas 1994; Brennan and Pettit 2003; Gargarella 2005, 183)—and on the fact that it is crucial for

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the way political space and citizenship are understood from this perspective. According to Habermas’ pertinent formulation, from the perspective of republicanism, political participation serves to maintain government activity under citizen control (as in classical liberalism), and the authority of the government emerges from the power of citizens, “produced communicatively in the praxis of self-legislation.” Therefore, “the state’s raison d’être does not lie primarily in the protection of equal private rights but in the guarantee of an inclusive opinion- and will-formation in which free and equal citizens reach an understanding on which goals and norms lie in the equal interest of all” (Habermas 1994, 2). Thus, its legitimization lies in its capacity to protect that praxis by “institutionalizing public liberty,” through a series of civic rights, understood as rights of participation and communication. Moreover, this horizontal formation of political will aimed at “mutual understanding or communicatively achieved consensus” would have a grounding normative role (Habermas 1994, 1–2), because this political will is assumed to be the precondition of the citizen practice of self-determination and, at the same time, as the basis that prevents political communication from being assimilated to the government apparatus or to market structures.6 As Gargarella points out, in a formulation that comes very close to what Rancière is interested in emphasizing, the idea is to “close the gap (opened by liberalism) between citizenship and politics,” insisting that “the citizens themselves” should be “primarily responsible for the political life of the community” (Gargarella 2005, 182). But this entails a particular type of citizenship, a citizen ethos, formed and fostered by the community and identified with it and its values. And it also implies the idea that a collective will is possible as a product of agreements among equals, among those considered equal by the law and who share the same citizenship principles. For these reasons, Rancière suggests that the figure of the republic cannot refer simply to the “rule of law,” but that it is much more and something more contradictory. At stake is the claim that the gap between citizenship and politics, between citizenship and community institutions, can be closed, that is, the claim of including institutionally, in a contradictory manner, the excess of equality. This is so because, on the one hand, it is assumed that equality can be inscribed in a law emerging out of popular will, which involves something important: the inscription of the excess of the demos into right, with everything this entails. But, on the other hand, this excess is denied by attempting to identify citizenship with a particular ethos that would ensure the stability of the republic and its legitimacy. Furthermore, regardless of how universal or normative it is conceived, this ethos always refers to the mores of a society, to a civic virtue committed to certain values and ideals. And these have to be fostered by a community of sense in order to allow for its functioning, thus immunizing it with respect to egalitarian manifestations capable of altering



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it significantly. Therefore, Rancière (2006b, 64) concludes that the logic of the republic is consensual, as Plato’s republic already was in a certain sense, since, in general, it aims to achieve “a regime of homogeneity between State institutions and societal mores,” which is precisely what, in part, characterizes consensus. Of course, one could reply, as Eduardo Rinesi (2015) does, that there is not just one way of understanding the republic. In fact, one could well emphasize, not the ideas of civic virtue and a republican ethos, but the republican institutional dimension, which refers to mechanisms aimed at ensuring non-domination, such as “the division of powers, systems of (horizontal and vertical) controls by the representatives of the people and State agents and officials, the struggle against personalisms, the condemnation of corruption” (92). Moreover, according to Rinesi, one could stress that the res publica is a battlefield, “and that it is by means and not in spite of that battle that the republic becomes stronger, more vital, and richer” (92). At stake here is a plebeian version of republicanism that takes up a Machiavellian reading of it, in order to assert the republic as the regime best suited to channeling conflict institutionally. In this sense, it assumes, with Machiavelli, that “the most stable republic will be that which manages to express conflict institutionally, to channel conflict in a public manner, so as to avoid factious actions that go against life in common” (Hilb 2000, 134). Thus, plebeian republicanism accepts that division appear as part of the given common, that is, as a division or conflict that can be resolved through established state institutions or other state institutions that would have to be created. Hence, Rinesi’s (2015) conclusion regarding the importance of the state for his proposal, since it is capable of providing instruments to promote forms of equality and freedom that can be better developed “ ‘from the top down’ than ‘from the bottom up,’ from the State apparatus itself” (93). In fact, according to Rinesi, what the great republican tradition, from Cicero to Hegel, has invited us to think “is that we are free not against the State [. . .], but precisely in the State” (93). Thus, plebeian republicanism is a state-centered proposal that refuses to conceive practices of equality that, despite making use of state resources and seeking to create others, oppose the state’s attempt to synthesize, unify, and monopolize the common and the power of decision and intervention in it. As such, it is a proposal that does not allow for thinking the tension that inevitably arises and really taking up the social conflict between state institutions, no matter how egalitarian they claim to be, and emancipation practices. Moreover, it could be said that plebeian republicanism also requires a certain ethos, in this case, confidence in the state’s power of synthesis and resolution of conflicts, confidence in the state’s capacity to prevent the domination that it actually produces many times, when attempting to guarantee the opposite.

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However, the construction of the common might require fracturing such confidence and recognizing the tense relation between the state and emancipatory practices, more than merely denying the state or simply accepting it as an inevitable framework. 5.4.2.  How to Build the Common in the Midst of Conflict? In order to consider this question, I shall discuss the experience of experimentation and political organization that has taken place in Bolivia, first, with the popular uprisings between 2000 and 2005, and then with the drafting of a plurinational constitution in 2009 and the project of a renovated socialist government (that claims to be anti-neoliberal) under the presidency of Evo Morales. Among the reasons for selecting the case are the following: it is a recent experience of political reconfiguration that makes it possible to appreciate the difficulties, contradictions, and risks that can arise when given institutional schemes are exceeded and institutional transformations are attempted from a series of popular emancipatory practices, within an alternative project of state building. Moreover, this case has encouraged recent reflections on ways to articulate the common and alternative institutions, in both contemporary Latin American movements and academic approaches. It is a Latin American experience that, as John Holloway says in his preface to the German edition of Zibechi’s Dispersing Power, has inspired and continues to inspire contemporary political imagination (from South to North?) (Zibechi 2010, xv). And, I would add, that here imagination is challenged by difficulties and dead ends that are unavoidable from the perspective of a situated thought, such as the one I have attempted to display in this book. Evidently, as Rancière has pointed out in his works on history (particularly in The Names of History), there are different forms of narration, of constructing the narrative text in which an event appears and is told, and of asserting or denying its singularity. In the case of Bolivia, there are different readings inspired by very different assumptions: on the one hand, state-centered readings, such as those of Álvaro García Linera (2008) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010),7 focused on thinking the manner in which democratic struggles in Bolivia led to a citizen revolution and refounding the state. In a convergent yet different line, we have interpretations such as that of Íñigo Errejón (2012), which see the Bolivian process as creating a counter-hegemony (with respect to neoliberalism). On the other hand, there are approaches that distance themselves from state-centered interpretations, whether to underscore the disconnection between popular uprising practices or insurrection and the traditional project of state building, such as Zibechi’s ([2006] 2010) anti-state reading; or to evince the conflict and tension between the emancipatory practices of popular uprisings and organization that occurred in Bolivia between 2000 and



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2005 and electoral, representative politics, with its project of refounding the state, as seen in the works of Raquel Gutiérrez (2009, 2017). For reasons deriving from what I have said thus far, I believe that ­Gutiérrez’s reading is the most adequate when discussing the conflictivity at stake in the Bolivian experience, as well as the singularity of the emancipation practices mobilized there, given its complex, non-dichotomous or idealized analysis of their emancipatory character. This reading does not reduce such practices to an anti-state movement aimed at dispersion, de-totalization, and reduction of the state, but rather attempts to show their experimental dimension, in the sense of creating forms of intervention that demonstrate the equal capacity of anyone. This is precisely what is lost and betrayed in statecentered interpretations, as I will explain below. Let us think about two quite critical and refined state-centered perspectives, whose significant limitations I want to highlight, while, at the same time, drawing on some of the elements I consider interesting for the debate on institutions of the common: on the one hand, Boaventura de Sousa’s decolonial perspective and, on the other, Íñigo Errejón’s reading in terms of hegemony. (1) De Sousa Santos starts out by critically discussing some leftist statecentered understandings, whose colonial dimensions he makes evident. De Sousa conceives his work in line with the activity of egalitarian, decolonial social movements thinking with it, and distancing himself from a Eurocentric critical tradition. With respect to the former, De Sousa is interested in showing that the two most influential alternatives among the Latin American Left to counter capitalism, social reformism (Keynesian, social-democratic, Lulastyle) and twenty-first-century socialism (Chavez-style), share problematic aspects that would have to be abandoned. On the one hand, these alternatives expanded democratic mandate, while at the same time creating distance between the “ordinary experiences of the popular classes and their expectations for the future” (De Sousa 2010, 28); on the other hand, they resorted to “a space for maneuver created by global capitalism, without being able to interfere significantly in the configuration or permanence of that space” (28). For De Sousa, the persistence of those problems has to do with the fact that those projects could not be real alternatives to capitalism, given that they did not question the colonial assumptions underlying it or the modern figure of the state associated with it. Thus, it is necessary to do away with the colonial assumptions that have guaranteed the expansion of capitalism and its mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession (De Sousa 2010, 59). Among these assumptions are the monolithic, centralizing interpretation of state power, as a homogenous geopolitical space that neutralizes ethnic, cultural, and religious differences and focuses on the creation and control of borders; a universalist understanding of state laws that ends up legitimizing all of the exclusions it

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produces; a bureaucratic organization distanced from the people’s needs and concerns; an emphasis on the monopoly over violence as the elimination of all non-state violence, which actually never occurs; and the exercise of sovereignty mainly through internal and external coercive force (De Sousa 2010, 70–71). Against this colonial view, De Sousa proposes two intertwined paths: first, an institutional transformation of those structures in order to produce a decolonial configuration of the state; and, second, given the long duration of the modern figure of the state and its incorporation into a multiplicity of embodied practices, a cultural, symbolic struggle aimed at changing both habitus and subjectivities, which, according to De Sousa, would have to involve all social sectors, especially taking into account the importance of intercultural dialogue, which is essential to his proposal. The two paths are linked because, for De Sousa, one of the main lines of that struggle is the creation of a new constitutionalism, such as the one he believes has been developing in Bolivia since the plurinational constitution of 2009. This new constitutionalism (1) is not a stable-homogeneous construction, but has been created from the top down, creating the resources to ensure the continuity of that intervention; (2) it also gives rise to a plurinational institutionalism, (3) to asymmetric autonomies regarding territory, (4) to legal pluralism, (5) to an intercultural democracy; and, together with all of that, fosters and is exposed to the emergence of new subjectivities (De Sousa 2010, 72). I cannot dwell on each one of these points, as it would imply digressing from what I am interested in highlighting at the moment. Above all, I consider fundamental De Sousa’s critique of the colonial character of the modern state, its link to capitalism, and the manner in which the refounding of a noncolonial state could counter that. Moreover, I believe that several of the institutional figures and strategies analyzed by De Sousa can open up interesting forms of equality, capable of nurturing new struggles and political actors. I also share De Sousa’s insistence on a political understanding of right that questions its juridicalization, as well as the methodological concerns that lead him to formulate an epistemology of the South. However, I find it insufficient and problematic, for reasons stated above, to center political transformation exclusively at the institutional-state level, losing sight of the tense relation of political actors with that dimension, even when they make use of it. Of course, this does not mean that De Sousa disregards tensions in general. In fact, he recognized the tensions between current Bolivian state policies regarding hydrocarbons exploitation and indigenous movements that have opposed them, making use of resources provided by the constitution, while also supporting the government in their own way. However, he has conceived this dispute as an intercultural conflict that can be handled with the tools offered by the Bolivian plurinational constitution and its



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assumptions (see De Sousa 2010, 98). The questionable point here is thinking these tensions exclusively as conflicts among cultures and as tensions that state institutions can resolve. Along this path, it is impossible to appreciate that such confrontations often have to do with tensions between two different logics for thinking the political: a logic of the common and a logic of organization of the common as public through state mechanisms, as Gutiérrez has demonstrated. (2) On the other hand, according to the narrative set forth by Íñigo Errejón in his doctoral dissertation on the insurrectional process in Bolivia (2000–2005), this process is interpreted in terms of the formation of a new hegemony consolidated during the first administration of Evo Morales (2006–2009). Thus, he reads the uprisings that took place between 2000 and 2003 as constituting a “rebellious cycle” that revealed the crisis of the neoliberal Bolivian state and brought about the emergence of a counter-hegemony with respect to that economic model. This linear narrative, which I would even describe as teleological, reaches its happy ending with the transformation of that counterhegemony into a new, victorious hegemony. Errejón reads the uprisings as phases of a process, as preparatory stages that gradually make possible the state crisis (in the case of the so-called Water War) and the dichotomization of the political field (in the case of the so-called Gas War). In his view, “the ‘Water War’ ” allowed for the initial articulation of “a national, anti-neoliberal discourse that formulated” and laid “the foundations for the construction of an indigenous, poor majority, opposed to the [established] elites” (Errejón 2012, 390). But what is most important about this moment is that it opened up “the Crisis of the State as a point of no return,” making evident “the neoliberal hegemonic instability” (390). On the other hand, “the defense of gas and its industrialization became a cohesive referent that allowed for the inscription of numerous specific demands into a discourse that combined the recovery of natural resources— the country’s main wealth—with the idea of national sovereignty” (Errejón 2012, 394). This allowed for the simplification and radical dichotomization of the Bolivian political field between an identity in the process of formation, the people of Bolivia, as part and as whole represented by that part, and the “elites” as constitutive exteriority (Errejón 2012, 394). A hegemonic regime was thus consolidated during the constitutional reform process and the first administration of Morales, which could be understood as an “expansive hegemony.” This means, according to Errejón, “an operation whereby an active consensus is generated, which mobilizes the masses in order to transform the existing regime” (32–133). It is a metonymical operation, through which a part, the part of the excluded, comes to represent society as a whole (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 141), on the basis of “a certain contiguity of discursive elements” that allows for the displacements of meanings (Errejón 2012, 133).

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In the case of Bolivia, such expansive hegemony arose as a regime of the “popular national,” a regime of sense whose articulating nucleus are “the plebeian, indigenous, impoverished sectors” that assert themselves as “the national essence.” As the highest point of the hegemonic operation, we have a new horizon in which “the claims and aspirations of different social sectors” are inscribed and which would be partially embodied in the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) and its charismatic leader Evo Morales. In fact, this capacity for representation would explain Morales’ electoral victory and his having obtained consensus for his political vocabulary and his project of nation (Errejón 2012, 570). This narrative, which I have merely outlined but hopefully not distorted, makes evident several significant problems. First, the very construction of the narrative is questionable, since it orders and gives meaning to events according to the specific logic of discourse theory, which robs them of all singularity. Therefore, the “plebeian power” of the uprisings considered only acquires meaning and value by virtue of their being read as moments of the process of formation of a new hegemony. This also entails that events end up as materials to prove a preestablished theory. This methodological proposal completely omits the singular political capacities that were created, experimented with, and manifested in those moments, which is something that the analyses carried out by Raquel Gutiérrez do permit. As a matter of fact, this limitation also has to do with problematic assumptions, which, as Castro-Gómez (2015, 369–70) has pointed out, derive from Laclau’s populist logic, which Errejón resorts to in his argumentation. Indeed, (1) by thinking the political “we” on the basis of leveling claims and making them equivalent, the entire emphasis is placed on those claims and their unification, rather than on the process of subjectivization by means of which subjects affirm an unrecognized political capacity by formulating a claim as an unprecedented claim. Moreover, this (2) gives rise to a quite reactive understanding of political subjects, as if they merely made claims to the state and limited their actions to articulating those demands, which would lose sight of the political creativity involved in the manifestation of these demands and in the design of proposals to handle the problems. This (3) omits something I have been emphasizing in this book: the fact that the formation of political subjects requires a corporeal, experiential work, manifested in raising the political claims that they themselves have created (Castro Gómez 2015, 369–70). And this omission is no small problem, because it relegates the fact that those manifestations, rather than a unitary process, made possible the reinvention of the common. In this sense, I believe that the logic of hegemonic political construction, which Errejón takes from Gramsci, via its specific appropriation by Laclau and Mouffe, is not a logic of construction of the common. Actually, as Errejón himself acknowledges, hegemony is only



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one of the possible forms of construction of political power, whose distinctive feature is achieving the active or passive consensus of those governed with respect to the ruling group, which manages to present its political project as the realization of a greater good—tending to universality—thus overcoming its own particularity. (Errejón 2012, 569–70)

That is, it is a logic that presupposes the ruler–ruled relation, aimed at producing the adhesion of the latter to a general political project with which they would identify, thus making it a type of identification logic. There is no recognition here of the capacity of bodies to alter themselves and intervene in their fate, as an unprecedented common capacity they can display when manifesting themselves as the part that has no part (Rancière’s expression, which Errejón, via Laclau, mobilizes with other objectives). Rather, this capacity is delegated and embodied in a project and a leader that can represent and speak for the miscounted part. The problem is that the miscount is still present in that structure of delegation, not due to the representation per se, as mediation, which takes place in forms and mechanisms of argumentation employed by egalitarian movements, as we saw above. Rather, it is because representation is constructed through a party and a charismatic leader that speaks for those who have no voice, who intervenes for those who cannot intervene, thus reaffirming their incapacity and reproducing an anti-emancipatory logic. Beyond the problems and idealizations it might present, Raquel Gutiérrez’s interpretation of these political processes makes it possible to question that logic of dispossession of bodies and its anti-emancipatory assumptions. Let us see how. In her well-known work Rhythms of the Pachakuti [2009] (2014), G ­ utiérrez builds a narrative through which she attempts to gather and examine the political singularity displayed in the Bolivian uprisings between 2000 and 2005. In her work, the construction of an argumentative weave is very important in order to make the voices of the political actors heard, as well as their proposals and what they sought to resolve, by thinking with them. Thus, she avoids imposing on events a theoretical construction that would endow them with meaning from the outside, as well as a problematic empirical allegiance aimed at grasping a mere object of study. Therefore, Gutiérrez composes her proposals for reflection, with the political actors she studies. And each one of the uprisings she discusses (the “Water War” in Cochabamba, the Aymara blockade of La Paz, the coca leaf growers struggles between 2000 and 2003, the struggles in defense of gas, the uprisings in El Alto and the subsequent Water War there) is analyzed taking into account the political dispositifs

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produced by communities, associations, and movements with specific proposals and different everyday practices, characterized by tensions and conflicts that cannot be simply synthesized in a linear, unitary process, despite their convergence in common concerns. In particular, Gutiérrez’s (2014) reflections reveal the construction of a political proposal understood in terms of a collective work of self-government and being with others which involved “some techniques pertaining to such a case, such as rallies, meetings, rotation of posts, social oversight” (26).8 Gutiérrez is thus interested in showing how at stake in those experiences is “the construction of a horizon of action that represents an alternative to the one that exists” (27), as a possibility for the future that is already occurring in the present, and how that horizon manifests a proposal that is fundamental for all those movements: the attempt to make possible the reappropriation of the country’s social wealth and to foster the refounding of political structures so that institutions allow for popular intervention, the participation and decisionmaking capacity of anyone in the affairs that affect and concern them. In this sense, the common that is constructed in these experiences has to do with various levels of reflection that have been arising in contemporary debates on the matter: on the one hand, the need to question essentialist views of the common that take it as something given and primordial or as a historical end that must be reached, in order to rethink it as a process arising out of the social plurality and conflict, as always already under construction that can emerge from the bottom up and in a relational manner. As we have seen, this mode of construction of the common involves situating oneself in other ontologies that are being produced in social worlds, as opposed to the ontology of individualism and the boundaries it establishes. Moreover, the experiences studied by Gutiérrez reveal that the concern about the common arises as resistance to diverse mechanisms through which late capitalism and its logic of competition, forms of commodification, financialization of the world economy, and new technologies constantly produce the privatization of spaces that could give rise to practices and forms of common use. This is why these logics of construction of the common involve the production of reflections that defend the collective character of certain goods, spaces, and activities, through a particular political activity. According to Gutiérrez, According to this perspective, the common ceases to be an object or something controlled by a few, and comes to be understood as a collective action of production, appropriation, and re appropriation of what there is and what is done, of what exists and what is created, of what is provided and generated by Pachamama herself, and also, of what, on that basis, has been produced, built, and achieved by the articulation and common effort of historically and geographically situated men and women. (Gutiérrez 2017, 75)



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These experiences achieve a form of building together through which collective actors affirm their capacity to decide about their world and everything that forms part of it, such as natural resources and forms of economic production, in dialogue with the territory. Here, of course, it is fundamental to understand that mother earth or Pachamama is never merely an available resource that can be exploited, but always an assemblage of histories, affects, spaces, organic and inorganic beings that enter into multiple, vital relations, an assemblage on the basis of which life and subsistence can be organized. This understanding makes it possible to imagine different ways of being with others in the territories, which involve the extension and reconfiguration of ways of doing and collective work, rather than the mere establishment of boundaries determining belonging or of agreements regarding courses of action. But let us return to the question whose answer has still eluded us. How would it be possible to foster institutions that inscribe and potentiate those multiple registers of the common? To a certain extent, Gutiérrez’s work and the experiences she studies could be read as dealing with that question; however, given her methodological commitments, which I share, she cannot provide a model as an answer. Because I cannot deal with each step of her argument in detail, I shall concentrate on one of the experiences she analyzes, which is an essential driver of her proposal. I refer to the experience of the “Coordinadora in defense of water,” which was fundamental in the so-called Water War in Cochabamba. This experience led to the creation of a series of dispositifs (practices, discourses, forms of organization) to institute the common and think about more communal institutions, driven by a key political question: “Who decides public matters” (Gutiérrez 2014, 27)? The Coordinadora was created in November of 1999 by several associations,9 initially brought together by two concerns: a contract granting the distribution of drinking water and sanitation services of the city of Cochabamba to a local subsidiary of a transnational company and the approval of Law 2029 regarding Drinking Water and Sanitation Services. This law, according to Gutiérrez (2014), was “the regulatory framework to seize water systems management from local and municipal control,” and hand it over “to private hands and regulate it top-down from a state structure” (3). The main objectives of this process of regional political articulation, which were decided and agreed upon collectively as common concerns, were: (1) demand that water not be considered a commodity and open up a political debate regarding the status of water (whether it is a public or human right or a common good) (Gutiérrez 2014, 15); (2) create a “self-managed, sociallyowned company”10 for the use and distribution of water, a claim that immediately “clashed with the existing legal infrastructure and was limited by the bureaucratic framework” (Gutiérrez 2014, 17); and (3) defend the idea that,

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given its common status, water cannot be a vertically managed resource, but rather controlled, reappropriated by the communities involved. (4) However, upon recognizing the normative limitations that clashed with these initiatives, the Coordinadora decided to promote a “constituent assembly without party intervention to build the country in which we want to live, ” according to one of the representatives (quoted in Gutiérrez 2014, 15). As Gutiérrez (2014) points out, “In that context the constituent assembly was perceived as and expected to be an authority for civil society’s political organization. It would enable working men and women to recover the capacity to plan and participate in public matters” (17). It was thus perceived as an institution of the common, capable of transforming the country’s life by creating institutions that allowed people to participate and decide significantly on their lives. Interestingly, in promoting those objectives, the Coordinadora gave rise to a conception of democracy that comes very close to Rancière’s: What is really being discussed? What is really being discussed is the content of government decisions. Are the decisions being made in the population’s interests or are they simply adapting to what foreign financial entities prescribe? [. . .] This is the underlying problem. Who decides the population’s present and future, its resources, and its work and living conditions? Regarding water, we want to decide for ourselves: that is what we call democracy. (quoted in ­Gutiérrez 2014, 27)

This declaration, which might be read simply as advocating direct democracy, does not so much denounce representation, but the fact that it has impeded the affirmation of people’s common capacity for decision regarding the affairs that concern them. This goes hand in hand with an understanding of democracy that emphasizes the power of intervention of anyone on the present, the futures it may open, and the ways of facilitating it on the basis of certain conditions. That affirmation of a sort of “social sovereignty” was central in the struggles for the “social re-appropriation of material wealth,” in the Water and Gas Wars, the coca growers opposition to several of the regulations of the American anti-drug policy, and, in general, in “the political platform that Aymara men and women designed between 2001 and 2002 during the wave of uprisings in that region” (Gutiérrez 2017, 36). In these struggles, people claimed a right, and, at the same time, granted it to themselves by demonstrating their power of intervention in matters they decided to defend as common. Gutiérrez gives the name Pachakuti to this understanding of democracy in plebeian or radical terms, if you will, as “an inversion of the chain of command, which seeks to institute the right to decide in common on the available material wealth” (37). With respect to a vertical logic of life management, this



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inversion is a transformation of the ways times, spaces, and relations between bodies and their world are experienced.11 One of the conclusions we can draw from Gutiérrez’s analyses and that might disappoint those expecting a conclusive answer to the question regarding institutions of the common is, precisely, that the question found no answer materialized in reality. Of course, these processes experimented with forms of decision-making and different assembly and deliberation techniques in their defense of certain goods as common, and in their resistance to state and corporate monopoly over public decisions. However, this concern for instituting and fostering logics of construction of the common that prioritize “the problem of the care and expansion of collective capacities” (Gutiérrez 2017, 43) at the national level did not manage to affect the Bolivian project of refounding the state. Clearly, to state this does not mean to question the effectiveness of these processes, as this would be inconsistent with recognizing the autonomy of said practices and the fact that they did achieve the assertion of the capacities and dreams of a different world of the bodies involved, as well as a change in their forms of relation and the social imaginary (Gutiérrez 2017, 35–36). In relation to this, Gutiérrez recognizes that these organizations discourse of reappropriation of common goods managed to have repercussions on the national-indigenous discourse that the MAS ended up developing and representing (Gutiérrez 2017, 35), though not without tensions and contradictions, since the proposals for self-organization and community self-management were not taken into account in the consolidation of the national-state project. And the latter ended up favoring a synthetic and unitary comprehension of the state as a figure of vertical management (Gutiérrez 2017, 35). Certainly, one cannot disregard the important transformations made possible by the plurinational Bolivian state, in order to expand the base of social rights and carry out redistribution policies, through programs of nationalization and control of surpluses by the state (regarding hydrocarbons, for example), which have allowed for the financing of social policies and providing its own capital to the state, without subordination to the requirements of international organizations (IMF, World Bank) (García Linera 2008, 515), as is the case of the neoliberal state. Nevertheless, despite the improvements they might bring to minimum life conditions, these undoubtedly significant redistributions do not challenge the logic of privatization of the common that grants all decision-making power to the state: State-centered politics states what it will do for and over society as a whole: what type of politics it will implement, which programs of redistribution it is going to carry out, etc. By speaking in that manner, it situates itself symbolically in the locus of the apparent representation of social totality and claims to speak “for everyone.” (Gutiérrez 2017, 61)

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This distribution of power according to which some decide for others has always been a seemingly inevitable problem—to a greater or lesser extent— in a state configuration (Gutiérrez 2017, 81, 85). Thus, we apparently come face to face, again and again, with a tension already suggested by Arendt in her work on revolution: the great difficulty of reconciling the need for structural economic-social transformations having to do, for instance, with land ownership and “collective access to certain goods and ‘means of existence’ ” (De Angelis 2012, quoted in Gutiérrez 2017, 136), and the need to create spaces for political intervention that make possible collective decisions “on matters of general concern” (De Angelis 2012, quoted in Gutiérrez 2017, 136). But it is not simply a question of affirming a sort of tragic fate, as if an effort in the former direction would necessarily betray the latter and as if emphasizing the latter entailed disregarding the former. It is, rather, a question of recognizing the inevitable tension between vertical interventions in the social fabric and autonomous practices of power, and turning it into a productive force that generates new inscriptions of equality: for example, achieving less state-centered configurations that are more open to recognizing and granting a place to new forms of egalitarian intervention that exceed their spaces, mechanisms, and forms of expression. It is also a matter of embracing the importance of the “general transformation of the most immediate, everyday social relations,” which can arise out of those practices, as the path to achieving “more inclusive and general social relations” (Gutiérrez 2017, 110). In this sense, I agree with Gutiérrez (2017) on the relevance of insisting on both “constituent processes that challenge general frameworks” and produce significant modifications, and “the disruption of legal and procedural formats at different spatiotemporal scales” (110). This disruption involves the configuration of other rhythms and temporalities in the density of the present, such as those that emancipatory practices can produce in the everyday web of experience. That is why perhaps it is necessary to create state institutions that are open to, or at least do not block, those democratic spaces; but they should not be created or promoted by the state, as was the case in some progressive Latin American governments that ended up being paternalistic.12 State institutions would have to be more exposed to logics of construction of the common, in order to counteract those not very emancipatory paternalisticclientelist effects, by opening themselves up to social conflict. Thus, the question that continues to be at stake is that of how to extend these collective experiences of common power to institutions, and emancipatory actions can only attempt to answer it. However, they are already indicating the need to rethink social and state institutions and their relation to egalitarian practices, in terms of an insoluble tension that can be made productive.



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5.4.3.  Instituting the Common In their recent book Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century ([2015] 2019), Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval deal with several of the matters that interest me in this chapter. In fact, these French scholars, situated in the reflection on the common currently carried out by political actors and academics who have taken on the challenge of proposing alternatives to contemporary capitalism’s forms of regulation of life, rethink the common as a political principle. This means conceiving it as a principle of collective action that might give rise to different institutions and an alternative form of assuming politics, which political actors are producing and which only they can produce. I find their proposal interesting, first of all, because, in line with ideas I have argued for here, Dardot and Laval (2019) resist the reification and essentializing of the common, and insist that “only practical activity can make the common, just as it is only practical activity [of human beings]”13 (36)—in connection with the nonhuman, if we think about the practices of Latin American indigenous movements—“that can produce a new collective subject” (36). In this sense, I share their idea that there are no “natural common goods” (318) and that the common does not emerge, as for Hardt and Negri, due to dynamics fostered by the accumulation of capital itself.14 Rather, certain objects, spaces, or relations can be shown to be common through political activity, as in the abovementioned case of water in Bolivia, in which the political praxis of the “Coordinadora in defense of water” in Cochabamba defended it as a “human right” or common good. Moreover, Dardot and Laval insist that the common may also be built through institutional arrangements that make possible collective forms of appropriation, or even facilitate going beyond the binary oppositions between private property/state property, common property/ public property, in order to institute the unappropriable (Dardot and Laval 2019, 141). In particular, the authors are thinking of the right of use, which, by instituting that which cannot be appropriated, can set limits to private property and its exacerbated expansion in late capitalism (Dardot and Laval 2019, 280–82). This right would arise from and be mobilized through forms of staging and experimentation in egalitarian collective actions. The right of use alludes specifically to a right that actors grant themselves through their practices in order to decide together about the destination or end of certain spaces, forms of production, or relations. Thus, according to the authors, in order for use to be truly common, it must involve collective deliberation and determination—and, I would add, practices of experimentation that allow for the deployment of capacities manifested as common—on the part of those interested in destination (Dardot and Laval 2019, 344).

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In this respect, the authors cite the example of the occupation of lands by agricultural workers in the province of Córdoba (Spain), in May 2012. These lands belonged to the Andalusian government, acquired from private owners for purposes of agrarian reform. However, instead of redistributing these lands, the government of Andalusia allocated these lands for intensive agriculture projects or research projects financed by European subsidies. The occupation of the lands took place when the government, faced with economic difficulties, put them up for sale in 2012 and the people oppose that decision, refusing to have public resources end up benefiting private individuals. By occupying those lands, the workers were not claiming ownership but the common use of those 400 hectares, arguing that they “had not been used to feed anyone for twenty years.” According to the testimony of one of the occupiers, “the land belongs to no one. It is not a commodity. It must remain in the hands of those who work it. We’ve occupied this land to feed our families and live with dignity” (Dardot and Laval 2019, 282). Here, according to the authors, “remain in the hands of” does not refer to an alternative appropriation, but to the worker’s decision to establish that land as a space of common use. And this codetermination led them to propose an ecological agriculture project, managed by a workers’ cooperative, capable of sustaining the users and making possible the conservation of the resources used (Dardot and Laval 2019, 282). Now then, what is extremely interesting about the formulation of this right of use is that it leads to rethinking the issue of institutions and of how institutional inscriptions of the common could be produced. More specifically, according to Dardot and Laval, institutions would have to be conceived in terms of praxis, detached from the determination of authority and sovereignty. This means rethinking institutions as processes, acts, extensions of action that make possible a power, a capacity, and not merely as results that establish certain rules or authorize a power as legitimate. And it involves avoiding the sociological reduction of the institution to the instituted (Dardot and Laval 2019, 242), which emphasizes the reproduction of the established and thus prevents the unprecedented character of new paths for action from being recognized. In fact, according to Dardot and Laval (2019), in the sociological work of Durkheim and Mauss, the institution has to do with “all the beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity” (243), and with “all the ways of acting and thinking that the individual finds preestablished,” or “ways of acting or thinking—consecrated by tradition and which society imposes on individuals” (243). Thus, this understanding loses sight of the dynamic character of social realities, since they are conceived only as variations of established institutions, as if it were impossible to escape the already instituted in order to give rise to the unprecedented, to what could not be foreseen.



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Partly taking up the work of Castoriadis, Dardot and Laval then go on to think an instituent praxis, on the basis of conditions that are not simply reiterated but that, due to their altered recreation, make possible the configuration of new subjects. These subjects institute themselves by co-instituting the rules that give them their existence. Here we can point out an important difference between Rancière and Dardot and Laval, regarding the assumptions they take up from Castoriadis, having to do with the movement of self-institution of a political subject. Indeed, for Rancière, “no individual or community gives itself its laws or obeys itself” (Rancière 2017b, location 2829). Rather, individuals and political collectivities subjectivize themselves according to rules they appropriate, torsion, and disrupt, in a movement of alteration in the interval, and not of reaffirmation of the sameness of a community that is obedient to itself. However, in Dardot’s and Laval’s (2019, 259) view, this movement of institution of a political subject is not, as it is for Castoriadis, an operation of self-institution as absolute creation of the unrepeatable. Rather, the process of instituting is understood as a praxis of subjectivization through which a collective creates itself on the basis of given rules and institutions, in order to give rise to other forms of relating to one another, as well as to collective capacities that can be institutionalized in new rules. At stake here is a process of experimentation with alternative rules by means of which those different capacities and forms of relation can be extended to institutions that constantly struggle against the inertia they could fall into, in order to expose themselves to their own permanent recreation and reinvention. In the terms we have used in this study, this exposure involves the opening up of those institutions to being appropriated and torsioned by different subjectivization practices and their dispositifs of disagreement. This is what Dardot and Laval might be suggesting when they resort to Guattari’s idea of transversality: Transversality is the dimension of the group that is neither its official vertical hierarchy, nor the contingent horizontality of people who, by chance, belong to the group. The transversal dimension thus enables the group to grasp the meaning of its praxis and its concomitant subjectivities in order to engage in effective forms of (self) transformation [. . .] it is this “transversal” praxis of enunciation that makes it possible to continually act on the institution and prevent its inertial foreclosure. (Dardot and Laval 2019, 266)

Political actors are not doomed to moving from the fluidity of political action to the solidity of the institutionalization of their practices, because emancipation practices require certain forms of relation among actors, which are not separable from their objectives, from the forms of reflection on institutions, or from the criteria that drive them. Thus, emancipatory practices create

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“an institution open to its history, open to the distribution of positions or functions” established, which means that they are also exposed to the “relations of domination and exclusion that may fester within” (Dardot and Laval 2019, 267), although there may be inscriptions, institutional arrangements, rights and forms of interpreting them, that facilitate this institutional experimentation even more. As a matter of fact, at the end of their study Dardot and Laval (2019) include a series of “propositions,” understood as “overtures designed to invite reflection” (269) on the part of others capable of establishing or verifying them in their collective practices and everyday forms of doing. In this sense, those propositions can be understood as guidelines for a politics of the common (Dardot and Laval 2019, 269), that is, a politics that “cuts transversally across institutional separations,” that “embodies a democratic demand that is both generalized and coherent,” and extends to all the domains of social life in which human beings can act together and in which they should be able to intervene and decide regarding rules that affect them (Dardot and Laval 2019, 270). In addition to the right of common use, these include the possibility of conceiving the company as a common figure; the idea of a social democracy that grants citizen associations an active role; and handling public services as institutions of the common rather than on the basis of the state as a centralized administrative unit, thus transforming the state into the guarantor of citizens’ fundamental rights, responsible for satisfying needs collectively deemed to be essential. This means that the management of services could be entrusted to entities that include both representatives of the state, workers, and users (Dardot and Laval 2019, 303). Contrary to functionalist sociology, this would involve rethinking the state as a complex field of struggles and conflicts of interest and values, rather than as an “organism,” an “apparatus,” or a “machine” defined by functionality alone (Dardot and Laval 2019, 306). Above all, Dardot and Laval mobilize the idea of a federative principle, suggested sporadically by Arendt in the interview “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution” (1971). This principle, which differs from those of sovereignty and nation that still underlie the plurinational Bolivian state, for example, entails a different understanding of state. This comprehension breaks with the unitary principle of sovereignty and with the ethnicization produced by the nation and highlights the democratic principle of possible intervention by any concerned party. Power is then understood here as arising at a horizontal level, from the multiplicity of federal units that would reciprocally limit and strengthen their power, rather than being exercised from the top down by certain bodies of vertical representation. As opposed to what she states in other works, such as in On Revolution, here Arendt suggests that those units at the base of such an organization would be councils of all sorts and not merely councils of workers or professionals, conceived as bodies for political



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participation. They would be a new administrative subdivision free of the corruption and verticalization arising out of the prevalence of a consensual logic of public management (though these are not the exact terms used by Arendt). More than aiming at a territorial diversification of the state (from district to county, from county to state, and then to the Union, as in the U.S. federation), this organization would strive for a “radical pluralism of the public sphere,” capable of handling the multiple conflicts that cut across the social world (Dardot and Laval 2019, 332). Such pluralism could even be achieved through federations of different types so that the result is not a mere bottom-up relation of aggregation of districts to higher entities, but rather a correlation at the same level (Dardot and Laval 2019, 333). Moreover, that pluralism of the social and political field can even be accomplished, according to Dardot and Laval, through relations of diverse sorts, not just from the bottom up, but also horizontally, among different councils, some concerned with socioeconomic affairs and others with political mechanisms, in a reversible relation of reciprocal influence (Dardot and Laval 2019, 333). Although this proposal makes it possible to imagine forms of institutional experimentation capable of extending the common, and suggests elements to establish why some might be more suitable than others, its limitation is that it might end up suggesting the possibility of organizing and fully instituting the common. And in this case, it would lose sight of the importance of keeping open those autonomous spaces that exceed the established forms of instituting the common and the accepted public deliberation spaces. This entails openness to forms of social manifestation that do not necessarily operate on the basis of the established rules for deliberation or of the idea of deliberative praxis, deriving from Aristotle, which Dardot and Laval privilege for the sharing in common as the actualization of the capacity for deliberation that creates a community. Thus, it is this capacity, capable of defining certain rules of justice, that determines belonging to a political community (Dardot and Laval 2019, 144). However, unlike Aristotle, they do not identify that community with the state; they are interested in thinking a public space that escapes both the state and the commercial dimensions. And yet, it is striking that their construction of the common ends up subordinated to the deliberative formulation of certain rules of justice, since this could lead to closing off the field of experience to nondeliberative forms of experimentation through which actors can affirm collective capacities, thus neutralizing certain social conflicts. Moreover, in contexts such as the Latin American one, it is difficult to imagine a construction of the common that completely avoids the state dimension. This is so because the conflict with the state and the possibility of modifying some of its practices and structures can allow for the creation of popular political proposals that lead to the common use of territories, amidst the inevitable ambivalences.

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Therefore, perhaps the identification between the common and the principles of self-organization a community gives itself should not be the central focus. Although this is important, it is impossible not to highlight the fact that certain forms of organization and dispositifs of manifestation make it possible to affirm collective capacities for intervention in the established public sphere. And this can be done by affirming the very conflict that cuts across a community, in its criteria for partition (partage). This conflict might even challenge something that Dardot and Laval take for granted in their understanding of the common: the fact that it arises only out of the activity of human beings. As a matter of fact, it can also arise, as we saw in chapter 4, out of destabilizations of the human in which the inseparable correlation between the human and the nonhuman is affirmed. In any case, I believe that the emphasis should be placed on whether or not certain forms of organization and dispositifs of manifestation make it possible to assert common capacities of intervention in the public sphere and in what is assumed as community. In other words, what is crucial is the manner in which those capacities can be extended in institutions open to conflict. Thus, in my view, only institutions open to conflictual interventions and to their dissensual effects can be considered institutions capable of creating, recreating, and instituting the common. Furthermore, I consider it important to point out that it is not only certain institutions that allow for the creation of the common but also the movement of destabilization and questioning of existing institutions and the manner in which this de-instituting yet reconfigurative power can create other subjects and languages that are already transforming the field of shared experience, before having to be pinned down in new rules that organize the common. To conclude this chapter, I would like to rethink this relation between conflict and institution.

5.5.  INSTITUTION, CONFLICT, VIOLENCES The contribution of the institution to establishing a space for politics in which the forms of (self-)destructive extreme violence are—if only ­temporarily—ruled out is thus itself conditional. It depends on historical (“objective,” “subjective”) conditions that subject its efficacy to a second degree of “politicity” at once immanent and heterogeneous: the degree, precisely, that I am hypothetically calling “civility.” (Balibar 2015b, 99)

It is crucial to contextualize the above text for my purposes in this last section. In his book Violence and Civility, Etienne Balibar (2015b) endeavors to rethink the relations between violence and politics so as to evince their



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inevitable ambiguity: “the political ambiguousness of the figures of violence and, symmetrically, the ambiguousness of politics when it is confronted with violence” (1). This ambiguity involves an aporia: assuming, on the one hand, that politics is the field instituted to put an end to violence, and recognizing once and again that that we do not seem able to eliminate the latter, on the other. In view of this evident irreducibility of violence, we either resort to the idea that violent effects can be limited by establishing a sphere of the asocial or illegal, usually thought to be extra-political (this is the attempt to reduce violence to that which exceeds the boundaries of the political/discursive, in Arendt’s option); or think that legal forms are able to interrupt the spirals of violence generated, for example, by vendettas (from an institutionalist perspective). Either way, that claim to limitation continues to presuppose the idea of elimination of violence or the idea that it can be delimited and controlled (Balibar 2015b, 2). However, as Benjamin had already shown in his famous text on violence, the means to achieve such restriction seem to require more violence. In fact, a second difficulty emerges when one confirms the impossibility of defining and establishing clear-cut hierarchies among the different forms of violence, given that violence tends to cross limits, thus making it difficult to assign it to a specific sphere. Moreover, according to Balibar, phenomena of violence tend to be equivocal, since it is impossible to neatly separate forms of violence (private and public, physical and symbolic). Likewise, it is a phenomenon that multiplies itself and is easily disseminated, and any attempt to contain it seems, rather, to reproduce it. Finally, Balibar points out that violence is also equivocal because “we are unable to assign all the phenomena of ‘nonviolence’ and ‘violence’ once and for all to the poles of positivity and negativity” (Balibar 2015b, 2–4). One of Balibar’s theses is that politics has never stopped going around in circles with respect to the double negation of violence, which would arise due to the intersection of what the author calls the logic of “nonviolence” and the logic of “counterviolence” (Balibar 2015b, 4). The former has to do with the effort to create conditions to make violence impossible, and the latter, with the effort to free us from violence by turning it against those who reproduce it (Balibar 2015b, 4). However, the limitations of one nurture and sustain the other. In fact, it is well known that the rule of law resolves this tension between its objective of creating, as far as possible, a sphere of nonviolence, and its need to resort to violence, as counterviolence, in order to achieve that objective (Balibar 2015b, 5). But in its effort to eliminate the tension, the rule of law tends to produce an antinomic logic that involves the opposition between peace and war, law and violence, through which it legitimizes state violence. This antinomic logic also characterizes revolutionary violence and its idea of refounding the political space in order to free it from the violence

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of exploitation and domination, beginning by eliminating “the groups, forces, and apparatuses that perpetrate violence” (Balibar 2015b, 5). These logics can give rise to a very destructive vicious circle whereby one makes the other more rigid and violent, causing immunitarian effects that can even reach paranoia. This is a well-known and very complex phenomenon in Colombia. The logic of state counterviolence deployed in the country is so immunitarian to that which exceeds it that it seeks to quash, by any means possible, even through alliances with paramilitary forces, not only any infringement of nonviolence but also any suspected infringement or manifestation that might seem to jeopardize the state’s objective of nonviolence. In this sense, one could say that state counterviolence, especially in its preventive versions, has contributed to a tremendous escalation of violent conflict in Colombia, by stigmatizing any expression of disagreement as a threat to the nonviolence that the state claims to guarantee. Thus, any form of opposition or social protest has been criminalized and persecuted. Moreover, state practices and institutions reproduce both ancestral and renewed forms of corruption, patronage, and privatization of the common that have created an enormous social gap. Preventive counterviolence, in particular, has contributed to the escalation of violence by disregarding the fact that by criminalizing social conflict through both legal and illegal means, it fosters revolutionary forms of violence that justify themselves by denouncing the economic and systemic violences produced by the state, especially the fact that it has closed off spaces to channel social conflicts politically, that is, to make visible and transform politically the inequalities reproduced by the established institutions. This revolutionary logic that demobilized guerrillas in Colombia have been abandoning also tends to neutralize the conflictive character of the social by thinking that the object of the revolution, which justifies armed struggle, is the suppression of the practices, mechanisms, and apparatuses that have made possible the reproduction of state counterviolence. The goal was to achieve a form of society that would finally realize the interests of the exploited people by eliminating the relations of domination and oppression. And the obvious result was that the greater the exacerbation of a logic, the greater the fear of persecution by the other and vice versa. How, then, can the destructive circle of nonviolence/counterviolence be broken? I believe it is fundamental to set aside the dichotomous understanding of politics and violence, in order to stop thinking that social and state institutions control and eliminate violence through their mechanisms and that violence can be eliminated completely. It is necessary to understand that the attempt to fully achieve nonviolence can unleash the worst possible violences. In this respect, Balibar introduces the notion of antiviolence to refer to practices that can counteract, deactivate, or reduce violent effects, without claiming that forms of violence can be completely eliminated (­Balibar 2015b, 17).



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With these elements we can now return to the quote at the beginning of this section, according to which institutions can contribute to countering the effects of violence, albeit always conditionally, since it depends on the conditions offered by those institutions to foster what Balibar calls strategies of “civility,” that is, political practices that display different forms of anti-violence.15 In fact, in his book Citizenship, Balibar reflects on this tense relation between conflict and institution on the basis of what could be at stake in the idea of a conflictual democracy. This necessary belonging together of democracy and conflict is made evident when, instead of understanding democratic citizens as a legal subjects, one conceives them as political subjects that claim the right to decide on matters that concern them, as part of a space purported to be common. This figure of the political subject is in itself conflictive, as we have seen, insofar as the right claimed has to be disputed by challenging multiple forms of exclusion and inclusion that arise whenever a certain community of belonging is outlined through diverse institutional arrangements. Thus, this understanding of political subjects questions the idea of citizenship based on consensus, as well as that according to which citizens can be fully defined by institutional mechanisms that grant certain rights and regarding which there can be a rational agreement, as in Habermas. Balibar, therefore, takes up the idea of conflict together with that of exclusion, in order to point out that (1) many forms of exclusion are conflictive to the extent that they may be rejected, questioned, resisted (given that exclusions have effects on bodies that can de-subject themselves from their subjections and challenge them); (2) and that, at the same time, it should be noted that the forms of exclusion, especially exclusion from the political sphere (defined as the space in which the legitimacy of collective actions is decided), aim precisely at neutralizing conflict and repressing those forms of resistance or questioning that challenge the distributions of power produced by those exclusions (Balibar 2015a, 72–78). Therefore, these forms of state exclusion can, at least provisionally, produce impotence, as forms of preventive violence through which state violence seeks to counter nonstate forms of violence that threaten or question its authority. In this situation, these counterviolences can prevent the articulation and configuration of emancipation practices that would allow the political manifestation of social conflicts. But, paradoxically, this can trigger greater cycles of violence due to the bloody character of these forms of counterviolence and to the fact that social conflicts that are not channeled politically can, in turn, give rise to diverse forms of violence. Given the above, institutions are situated in the paradox of confronting the irreducibility of social conflict, while also channeling it, in order not to cancel themselves. Therefore, what needs to be taken into account is not so much the

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“complementarity of conflict and institution,” but rather, their “immanence” (Balibar 2015a, 96): the fact that institutions can embrace conflict and that conflict can also be expressed in institutional arrangements. As Balibar says, “All conflicts can be subsumed [or inscribed, in Rancière’s terms] into institutions, but all institutions are potential sites of future insurrections” (99). And this evidently entails a different comprehension of institutions, though this is not developed by Balibar or Rancière. As I have argued elsewhere (Quintana 2016b, 40), it is necessary to think that the function of the institution is not just to make social relations “less expensive, less uncertain, and less risky” (Hoyos 2016, 20), as in North’s neoinstitutionalism, and thus order and regulate them so that society preserves itself as such. In fact, institutions can foster other types of relations and promote collective forms of action and intervention, instead of merely fixing, framing, or regulating them through mechanisms of counterviolence. In this sense, institutions can be understood more as a matrix than as a framework, or in Deleuze’s (2004) words, as a “system of anticipation” (21), as a “positive model for action” (19) that produces relations and, with them, possibilities of experimentation or new freedoms. This implies that institutions must be thought not only in terms of structures that organize, restrict, and oblige conduct, as it is usually conceived in the juridical terms of the system of law, but also as operators of new forms of relating to and being with others (Deleuze 2004, 27). In view of the above, the objective of social and state institutions cannot be that of merely making possible a well-ordered, inclusive, socially cohesive society—within its established boundaries and rules. In fact, this would lead to the affirmation that if inequality is a problem, it is because it threatens social cohesion, and that its exclusion is undesirable, it is mainly because of its unbalancing or selfdestructive effects. But inequality and exclusion are a problem because they deny life possibilities, reduce to nothingness and nonsense actors and forms of life that, in their heterogeneity, demand to be part of a space assumed to be common (Quintana 2016b, 41). Therefore, it is necessary to fight for institutions that are more open to forms of anti-violence, in Balibar’s terms, and to everyone’s egalitarian forms of corporeal experimentation, to say it with ­Rancière. It is necessary to experiment with institutions able to inscribe better the always open possibility of those intervals that fracture the present with their gaps, and to foster open—or less ­immunitarian—paths toward the unforeseeable emergence of disagreement. Moreover, there is the effort to install in the long term these moments of reconstruction of a common time in the form of institutions affirming the capacity of everyone in all those spheres where within the dominant system, the management of time is identified as a production [. . .] of incapacities. (Rancière 2015, 18)



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This quote throws us back to the question of time dealt with in chapter 3, to the manner in which consensual time can be fractured, and to how these fractures can affect the relations of bodies to spaces, the experience of their capacities, what they can do, and their common power, which is precisely one of the issues that will concern us in the last chapter of this book. NOTES   1.  In this respect, particularly in the cases of Durkheim and Mauss, see Dardot and Laval (2014, 405–9). I shall return to this in section 4.3 of this chapter.  2. A version of sections 1 and 2, converted into an article, was published in Isegoría under the title: “Más allá de algunos lugares comunes: Repensar la potencia política del pensamiento de Jacques Rancière” (see Quintana 2018).   3.  Santiago Castro-Gómez (2015, 290–300) draws a similar conclusion, on the basis of those assumptions.  4. In order to avoid misunderstandings, this point, which Rancière insists on repeatedly throughout his works, requires clarification. In no way is it a matter of stating that equality is the basis of inequality, but rather that inequality cannot function on its own and needs to partly count on equality. Affirming the former would be problematic because “inequality is perfectly capable of taking care of itself, without needing anyone to give it a basis” (Rancière 2016d, 112), on the one hand. And, on the other, it would be quite questionable to say that equality grounds inequality, in the sense that it ultimately leads to domination.  5. Though the expression is Balibar’s (2010), I am reformulating it here in Rancière’s terms.   6.  Habermas’ affirmations come closer to a republicanism anchored in a strong idea of the common good and positive freedom, as participation in public affairs, which a procedural republicanism departs from based on the idea of ensuring freedom understood fundamentally as non-domination (or independence from an arbitrary power) (Skinner 1984, 1991). In this sense, Habermas does not contemplate here a distinction that is important for neo-republicanism: the difference between freedom as self-determination and freedom as non-domination and rule of law, which neorepublicanism prefers (Vatter 2012, 242). However, the notion of civic virtue, even if understood procedurally, is still important for neo-republicanism (Brennan and Pettit 2003), since it requires a certain citizen ethos, committed to non-domination, which is what I am interested in highlighting here.   7.  Although De Sousa Santos’ reading is decolonial, based on social movements and, therefore, much more conflictual, he thinks emancipation mainly on the basis of refounding the state.   8.  Though I am citing the English translation of Gutiérrez’s book, the translation was modified since it had an error: the author speaks of “fiscalización social,” which means “oversight,” whereas the translation says “social financing.”

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  9. Among them, the Federation of Irrigators of Cochabamba, the Federation of Manufacturers of Cochabamba, members of the Bar Association and of the Association of Engineers, as well as environmental defense activists (Gutiérrez 2009, 62). 10.  Once again, I have modified the translation so that it conveys the exact meaning in Spanish. The English version says “a self-managed social property.” 11.  Gutiérrez (2017) resorts here to an Aymara term: “The Aymara word Pachakuti is made up of two particles: Pacha, which means time-space, and is, therefore, a term that refers to the most intimate and fundamental bases of the cosmogonies of Andean cultures. On the other hand, kuti means turn. Thus, Pachakuti refers to the profound transformation of the space-time we inhabit, to the subversion and radical alteration of the existing order” (38–39). 12. This was the case of the community councils Hugo Chávez created in Venezuela. Two of their difficulties are significant: first, they turned out to be “an entire framework for participation,” regulated and authorized by the state, with criteria and mechanisms that establish and close off the forms of intervention, through measures that are prone to bureaucratization. Thus, although in some cases they facilitated the invention of new capacities, they paradoxically led to “the reduction of the population’s political possibilities and not to their broadening” (Gutiérrez 2017, 100–1). Moreover, those spaces fostered a programmed participation of a consultative sort, rather than one for the creation of popular decisions (Gutiérrez 2017, 102). 13. Translation slightly modified to include “des hommes,” as found in the French text. 14.  In fact, Dardot’s and Laval’s critique of the perspective of Hardt and Negri (see Dardot and Laval 2019, 190–232) coincides with the one carried out by Rancière in an intervention on communism (Rancière 2010c). They insist that the authors of Multitude think the common on the basis of a historical model of necessity, as a collective force that emerges within capitalism and leads it to overcome itself. Dardot and Laval, as well as Rancière, question the alleged impersonal necessity of history that dispossesses actors of their capacity for intervention. 15.  Different practices of anti-violence to counteract different forms of violence. Among them are hegemonic and majoritarian strategies (in the sense of Gramsci, Laclau, and Mouffe), aimed at structural transformations, and majoritarian strategies aimed at fostering other modes of subjectivization (Balibar 2015b, 100–26).

Chapter 6

Image, Times, Bodies

Whatever people say, our news bulletins present us with very few images of the wars, violence, or distress that the present on our planet; hardly any violent, mutilated, or suffering bodies. What we see mainly are the faces of those who “make” the news, the authorized speakers [. . .]. There is a staging of the relationship between the authority of the authorized word and the visible that it selects for our benefit: a staging of the events that count according to what those they reach think counts. The death of ­Richard Nixon or Jacqueline Kennedy obviously cannot compare with those hundreds of thousands of people we have never heard of, and who have been killed in far-away places with strange-sounding names. (­Rancière 2007b, 73–74)

This quote ties together several of the issues that I will be concerned with in this last chapter and that have cut across the entire book. At stake here are the question of boundaries of visibility and invisibility and its configurations of sense; the manner in which bodies can appear and be discarded in this space of intelligibility; and the idea of a certain logic of presentation of what there is that fixes capacities and incapacities, which, as we shall see shortly in relation to aspects dealt with in chapter 3, is also a temporal logic. We could even link it to the idea of critical agency mentioned in the Introduction, and the alleged lack thereof in contemporary subjects. In several of his texts on the image (see, e.g., Rancière 2007b, 2009d), Rancière refers to criticisms that accuse contemporary media of blinding us due to the excess of images, a proliferation that blunts understanding, banalizes what happens, and produces either indifference or lack of sensitivity in the face of violent, painful, traumatic experiences (Rancière 2007b, 73). In view of those criticisms, Rancière thinks that rather than unleashing a torrent of images, the dominant media reduce, select, and order images, according to 209

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consensual montages that establish what should be perceived and determine what should be imagined, thought, and felt. In this task of editing, few faces appear, few voices are allowed to be heard, and few bodies are allowed to express their power to reveal what happened. In this sense, informing, “in the dominant system” means to “put into form—eliminating any singularity in the images, everything in them that the simple redundancy of content that coveys meaning” (Rancière 2007b, 72). Deleuze had already pointed out that “informing means circulating an order-word [. . .] information is communicated to us, they tell us what we are supposed to be ready to, or have to, or be held to believe” (Deleuze 2006, 320). This selection and ordering are ruled by a representational principle that assumes that there are certain identities that have to live, appear, and speak in a given manner; that there are events that must be exhibited in a very codified way through specific images with their corresponding captions and sound effects; and that those events must be deciphered by experts on the different matters reported on and in the already established way. It is assumed that there is a sense of what occurred and that the media must report it in such a way as to produce the desired effect in the audience. This means that there are things that cannot be presented or said, previously codified acceptable and unacceptable ways of showing, and bodies that can appear in a certain manner and some that cannot. Returning to the initial quote, it is not that we do not see suffering bodies in the news; we do seem them at times, but as victims of violence, as merely dispossessed bodies who should only scream, cry, or simply repudiate their situation, on the basis of questions asked by reporters who allow them to speak for very few minutes, or of frameworks of presentation of their testimonies, which remain unaffected by the latter. But we do not see hurt bodies allowed to reenact their pain with the strength of discursive and expressive testimonies, whose capacity to account for what happened and continues to happen and how it affects them makes itself deeply felt. As we saw in chapter 3, these representational intelligibility frameworks involve a unitary, homogeneous, and linear temporal logic, whose normative character can be summarized in the idea of a “state of things” in which time operates as a “principle of impossibility” (Rancière 2011c, 1). This implies that certain things are no longer possible due to a consensual understanding of time, because “the times have changed,” and there are things it is no longer worth doing, ideas that can no longer be believed in, and futures that cannot be imagined any more. From such a perspective, what was was, that is, the past is concluded, closed, and, which as Nietzsche aptly observed, is carried as a burden (cf. Nietzsche 2006).1 For that reason, this logic does not want to know anything about “this past of the future, which is also a future of the past,” about those futures that may have been inscribed in the opening



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of the past, the opening of what happened as the promise of other possibilities as Walter Benjamin once pointed out; it wants to know nothing about “those two tenses, which are so good at conjugating their double absence” (Rancière 2014b, 4). That “absence” is deceiving for the spirit of consensual time (which is also the time of resentment), as Derrida had already observed in Specters of Marx. That is why it only trusts the “there is” of presence, that is, of what is fixed as present, given, evident, measurable, and calculable through indexes and opinion surveys. Now then, returning to the issue of the critical attitude, a reflection like Rancière’s allows us to think that the loss of reflexivity that can be observed at times in the contemporary world is not due to the blindness caused by the power of the apparent and the overabundance of images, or by the easy manipulation of the ignorant, but rather, to the forms of fixation and closing of meaning produced by consensual logic and its effect of blocking affective mobility. When everything is seen within the same framework of explanation and presentation of the visual and the audible, nothing can exceed the expected meaning, nothing can really surprise, nothing really happens that can affect, move, or touch, as worthy of concern. In this final chapter, I would like to discuss the manner in which certain aesthetic interventions fracture, torsion, and reverse those consensual dispositifs, in order to give rise to forms of perception and affects that make it possible to affirm other capacities, relations, and spaces, as well as heterogeneous forms of temporality amidst the most normalized and adverse circumstances. First, I will dwell on what an aesthetic logic that challenges the principle of representation and its inegalitarian distributions of the sensible entails from Rancière’s perspective, on the basis of his reading of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee and Walker Evans. Then I will discuss how an aesthetic distribution of the sensible makes it possible to reconfigure and imagine differently the body, its movements, and its being with others, on the basis of a series of scenes that Rancière has tied together discontinuously throughout his work, from the divided beauty of the Torso in the Belvedere that so interests Winckelmann, to Rodin’s fragmented and time-saturated bodies, to the body in movement of Loïe Fuller, “the dancer of light,” that so fascinated Mallarmé, to the bodies at the limit of what they can do in Pedro Costa’s films. I wish to inquire to what extent these figures of aesthetic imagination can affect the political imagination, without disregarding art’s impotence to affect certain realities. Finally, I will take up some of these elements to reflect on how aesthetic interventions can produce another image of time and, more exactly, how they can create heterochronic works of memory that affirm the potencies of bodies at the intersection of temporalities. In this respect, I will use some of Rancière’s considerations on documentary fiction, as well as the trilogy Campo hablado by Colombian filmmaker

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Nicolás Rincón-Gillé, which will allow me to situate the issues discussed in the circumstances I am writing in. 6.1.  EXCESSIVE REPORTAGE In the mid-1930s, Fortune magazine launched the series Life and Circumstances and assigned freelance reporter James Agee with a reportage on cotton sharecroppers in Alabama. The idea, according to the series guidelines, was to bring New York readers closer to the precarious life of Southern sharecroppers and their situation. It thus aimed at fulfilling the classic objective of reportage with its requirement of “double proof”: first, it must show that the reporter experienced the world he is reporting on, and, to this effect, it chooses “details whose very insignificance shows that they were not invented” (Rancière 2013a, 248); and, second, it has “to capture the most significant features. It has to choose signs that are sufficient to show misery and make it palpable for an audience, which will recognize it without having to see it” (Rancière 2013a, 248; my emphasis). The idea is to provide elements that make it possible to identify a particular way of life considered to exemplify a certain type of existence: the life that corresponds to Southern sharecroppers, their domestic tastes, their habits as x or as y. This same function of recognition operates in the case of photography in traditional reportage: it “does not lack captions attesting that these singular lives reflect a common fate and confirm a well-established manner of conforming to this fate” (Rancière 2013a, 249). In this view, the function of photography is to illustrate or attest to what texts say, and the captions included below each picture aim at establishing a reading of the images that reconfirms the overall meaning that the reportage seeks to produce. Thus, the art of traditional reportage suppresses a “double excess”: the excess of “a situation so outlandish that words and images can no longer render it.” It is the excess of an experience that refuses to be framed within the framework of meaning assigned to it, and the excess of “signs so trivial that there is no reason to choose one over another” (Rancière 2013a, 288, 49; my emphases), signs that can never exhaust or completely account for what happens. Thus, traditional reportage seeks to block the image’s infinite power of interpellation and the mismatch between text and experience, by attempting to tell what really happens. However, when he accepted the Fortune magazine assignment, Agee recruited his friend, photographer Walker Evans, to join him, and both made the unprecedented decision to create an aesthetic dispositif that would explode reportage from within, completely exceeding its codified structure. Each one would work alone and texts and images would be independent



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in the projected final article; photographs would not explain the text or be understood as mere illustrations of what was reported. The idea was to have the photos come first, before the credits and title of the book—an “impossible book” (Rancière 2013a, 261), which the article that was never published as such had turned into—and then the texts, with no correspondence or progression. Texts and images would each “say everything” (Rancière 2013a, 249), thus exploding the principle of selection of traditional reportage and its identification codes, which are the same ones of the representative regime of art, in which specific codes or expressive categories establish a correspondence between a character and a certain form of action, and between the latter and certain conditions of time and circumstance. In view of this regime, the aspiration to say everything implies several things: first, refusing to adopt a distanced position from the subjects of the reportage, in order to avoid objectivizing them as representatives of a life full of “nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation” (Rancière 2013a, 249), which would not only provoke the readers’ identification and condescending commiseration but also sell magazines. This also involves abandoning the aspiration to explain social realities through objective, knowable causes. The “whole” at stake here has to do with grasping the instant, “the wholeness of one minute of the world, of all these connections in space and time that make every life vertiginous.” And it has to do with capturing the existential fullness of each object in its singularity, the “inexhaustible totality of every instant” (Rancière 2013a, 255), since each object and each situation is conceived as part of “an existence that is entirely actual, inevitable and unrepeatable” (Rancière 2013b, 290). The idea is to embrace the uniqueness of life in its multiplicity and the unprecedented power of such uniqueness. Therefore, the particular cannot be taken as a case or example of the general, but as something that expresses the invisible “actuality” of the relationality of the world and the unforeseeable events it can bring about (cf. Rancière 2013b, 250): “the uncontrollable chain of events that create a cosmos and a destiny” (Rancière 2013b, 251). The problem is not to link everything to everything else, but to capture the great weight of necessity that crushes human beings, and the art with which they respond to it, in each detail. (Rancière 2013a, 253)

The problem is to grasp in each detail of an existence the weight bearing down on it, the difficult conditions it is thrown into, and how it might be able to respond to those conditions and reshape them, or in the language of this book, how to torsion and reconfigure those conditions on the basis of practices, styles of existence capable of creating an “art of living” (Rancière 2013a, 253). But this is not a mere adaptation of the poor to their precarious

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conditions, but an art that affirms what a body can do, or, in the words of Agee and Evans, their dignity. Nonetheless, that art of living is exposed to its undoing, to not being able to face or respond to the violences it must suffer. For this reason, each object, each style and practice of that art of living, which Agee and Evans seek to make felt in their work, is like a “scar from a double wound,” the wound caused by the necessity that certain existences are thrown into and the perceived incapacity to fully respond to the violence of that thrownness (Rancière 2013a, 253). That scar is also inscribed in the scenes and descriptions of everyday events that make up the book: Near a Church [. . .] They were young, soberly buoyant of body, and strong, the man not quite thin, the girl not quite plump, and I remembered their mild and sober faces, hers softly wide and sensitive to love and to pleasure, and his resourceful and intelligent without intellect and without guile, and their extreme dignity, which was as effortless, unvalued, and undefended in them as the assumption of superiority which suffuses a rich and social adolescent boy; and I was taking pleasure also in the competence and rhythm of their walking in the sun, which was incapable of being less than a muted dancing, and in the beauty in the sunlight of their clothes, which were strange upon them in the middle of the week. [. . .] I was walking more rapidly than they but quietly; before I had gone ten steps they turned their heads (toward each other) and looked at me briefly and impersonally, like horses in a field, and faced front again [. . .]. By the time I raised my hand, they had looked away, and did not see me [. . .]. I walked somewhat faster now [. . .]. At the sound of the twist of my shoe in the gravel, the young woman’s whole body was jerked down tight as a fist into a crouch from which immediately, the rear foot skidding in the loose stone so that she nearly fell, like a kicked cow scrambling out of a creek, eyes crazy, chin stretched tight, she sprang forward into the first motions of a running not human but that of a suddenly terrified wild animal. [. . .] I came up to them (not trotting) [. . .] still shaking my head (No; no; oh, Jesus, no, no, no!) and looking into their eyes [. . .]. I wanted only that they should be restored, and should know I was their friend, and that I might melt from existence: “I’m very sorry!” [. . .] I stood and looked into their eyes and loved them, and wished to God I was dead. After a little the man got back his voice, his eyes grew a little easier, and he said without conviction that that was all right and that I hadn’t scared her [. . .]. Their faces were secret, soft, utterly without trust of me, and utterly without understanding; and they had to stand here now and hear what I was saying, because in that country no negro safely walks away from a white man. (Agee and Evans 2001, 141–42)

This scene challenges and reveals the indignity of the voyeur’s gaze, which Agee and Evans reject throughout their book. That gaze is initially overcome by the beauty of the bodies in their mere appearance, as figures that interrupt the landscape and move across it with a certain rhythm and vibration. The



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pleasure the voyeur feels leads him to pursue “the objects” of his contemplation, losing sight of his situation and his location in it, until he realizes the effect of his pursuit and his gaze on the bodies he is observing. The scene makes it possible to perceive an affective space: the extremely violent immunitarian space of the world of segregation in the United States, which is manifested because it can appear without being named, described, represented, or accused, just by exposing it as a conflictive territory of affects. And, inevitably, the manner in which affects circulate from one body to another, in transfigurations and disfigurations that go from the human to the animal and the nonhuman, in the looks and gestures extending from one body to other bodies, erasing the contours among subjects and creating an undeterminable co-implication among them, since the writer shows himself to be completely touched, affected by this corporeal relationality, produces a sensation of shock. Thus, this scene manages to show how “the truth of one hour of the world” can be enclosed in the most trivial encounter (Rancière 2013a, 255); how the other side of beauty is a violent ambiguity and opacity; how an encounter among strangers can take place that is also an encounter with the opacity of each one; how words can account for the inapprehensible and unforeseeable exposure of bodies in “the cruel radiance of what is” (250). This cruel radiance demands from the readers a different gaze, a different attitude, different affects, and will, undoubtedly, provoke their perplexity, in view of an unprecedented “reportage” that makes impossible the easy feeling of emotional comfort of the already always seen and known. 6.2.  AESTHETIC LOGIC AND ITS REINVENTIONS OF BODIES As stated above, the aesthetic logic of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men affirms the openness of sense, the singularity of world events, their affective and excessive character with respect to any meaning, and the capacity of images and texts to attend to the most trivial details as the truth, thus challenging the representative regime of art. In several of his works and, more recently, in Aisthesis (2011), Rancière has been almost obsessively interested in discussing the aesthetic regime of art and its literary revolution.2 In particular, he has been interested in examining how these forms of intervention in the sayable, thinkable, and imaginable can give rise to a certain politicity. Let us dwell for a moment on this aesthetic logic and some of the possibilities it opens up. According to Rancière, in the Western world “aesthetics” refers to “the sensible fabric and intelligible form of what we call ‘Art’ since the 18th century”

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(Rancière 2013a, ix). It is a way of understanding art as a specific form of experience that destabilizes the hierarchies between the different arts (the previously called mechanic and liberal arts) and between different forms of life (since there are no longer subjects and forms of existence that are more or less deserving of entering the domain of art [Rancière 2013a, ix]). This revolution took place when art began to embrace objects, figures, images from the “prose of the world,” including the most trivial and insignificant things that were formerly excluded, while still differentiating itself from them and redefining itself with them: attending not so much to the “idealities of plot, form, and painting” as to those of “movement, light, and the gaze” (Rancière 2013a, xi). The emergence of the aesthetic regime of art depends on the transformation of the forms of sensible experience and opens up possibilities of alteration in the ways of perceiving and being affected, all of which have repercussions in social and political practices. In this sense, the issue is not that the conditions for the reception of the work of art have changed, but that the sensible fabric within which they arise has been transformed: performance and exhibition spaces, the manner in which they are perceived and interpreted, and the attitudes and affects linked to artistic creation. Thus, Aisthesis studies those transformations through singular scenes that make it possible to trace constellations among “modes of perception and affect, and forms of interpretation defining a paradigm of art” (Rancière 2013a, xi); these scenes grasp “concepts at work” and create “microcosms” in which this aesthetic logic of art gradually takes shape, transforms, and displaces itself (Rancière 2013a, xi–xii): From the mutilated Belvedere statue to the broken china rabbit belonging to the sharecropper’s daughter, via the distorted bodies of the Hanlon Lees brothers, Loïe Fuller’s unlocatable body, Rodin’s limbs without bodies and bodies without limbs, and the extreme fragmentation of gestures assembled by Dziga Vertov, they will be able to construct the history of a regime of art like that of a large fragmented body, and of a multiplicity of unknown bodies born from this very fragmentation. (Rancière 2013a, xiv)

If I have dwelt on Rancière’s’ proposals in Aisthesis, it is because they evince the centrality of the issue of the body in its multiple reconfigurations as a figure that makes evident the paradoxical links between this paradigm and its way of imagining the political community, that is, the way of being with others and their forms of collective action. In fact, the aesthetic regime of art entails, above all, a break with the representative regime’s organic and hierarchical understanding of the body as an expressive body, capable of a certain type of action, which leads to the understanding of discourse “as a body with well-articulated parts” (Rancière 2013a, xiv). Contrary to this representational

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approach, in an aesthetic logic bodies may become inexpressive, ineffective, yet quite active in that very passivity. They can stop telling a story when acting or dancing and become figures that move without a determined purpose. They can become significant as mere bodies: bodies that have the capacity to be affected and have experiences, bodies that lead an intense sensual life, as we can observe in the nineteenth-century French novel and later in film, which focus on corporeal events that are not the result of any will. In this manner, the understanding of action, history, and political community is also disrupted, since the life of anonymous, fragmented bodies begins to be significant in these three dimensions. The privileging of the history and action of some gives way to attention to the movement of anything, even that which manifests no recognizable will, but rather an impersonal alteration. What we have here is a suspension of actions, a community disconnected from any ideal project, which no longer seems to have a recognizable figure or a determined goal to achieve (Rancière 2013a, xiv–xv). Collective action and being with others are thus reconfigured by means of dispositifs that build action through the suspension of a strategic, hierarchical logic, in order to imagine figures of collective action with no defined leader, without a closed and concluded program, without fixed command positions. These figures of action can act through radical inaction, such as a general strike, in order to interrupt certain effects or create other possibilities, and not simply to achieve a project previously established as an end. Thus, alterations at the level of forms of perception and affects can produce transformations in the political imagination, in the manner in which the political vocabulary and the possibilities for action are thought and experienced, and in the interpretations of the social world. Rancière goes as far as to say that “social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution” (Rancière 2013a, xvi), since the latter traced paths for the creation and proliferation of different forms of political subjectivization that do not operate according to a project-oriented logic and do not aim to be either hierarchical or totalizing (Rancière 1999, 58). Let us examine some of these aesthetic reconfigurations of the body in order to explore some political aspects they can suggest.

6.2.1. Inexpressive Body, Fragmented Bodies, Unfindable Body Inexpressive Body We might indeed say that this Hercules seems to be the production of an earlier period of art even more than the Apollo. (Winckelmann, quoted in Rancière 2013a, 2)

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How can Winckelmann think that a mutilated torso is the apex of Greek art and the ideal of beauty? It is the torso, the dismembered figure of Hercules, the hero of the Twelve Labors and figure of action par excellence, deprived of his capacity or will to act. When Winckelmann exalts its beauty, he is suggesting that it resides in the deactivation of maximum activity, as an attribute that leads to contemplation. However, that activity becomes movement, because Winckelmann’s inactive Hercules is also a thinking figure, a figure enveloped in the movement of thought “indicated by the carve of a back,” in its muscles that do not seem to be tensed for action, but rather “flow over each other like the waves of the sea” (Rancière 2013a, 2–3). The boundary between thought and sensibility is also destabilized, given that, paradoxically, thought only reveals itself in the materiality of an “impersonal movement” of corporeality. The representative regime’s emphasis on the action of expressive characters is thus displaced by the attention to a movement lacking a determined expressivity. It is precisely a figure without a face—that would point to some ­emotion—and without limbs—that would indicate the intention to act. It is, then, an inadequate figure to tell a story or convey a meaning. By appreciating the Torso more than the Apollo, Winckelmann exceeds “two main criteria used by the representative order”: the harmony of proportions, as correspondence between parts and whole, and expressivity, or the determined relation between a “visible form and a character” or an identity (Rancière 2013a, 4). In the Torso, the ideal cannot be found in proportion and form, nor in a judgment regarding the harmony of the whole, or the verisimilitude with which the figure expresses the character traits it should represent, precisely because it is an unidentifiable fragment of a body whose totality is forever lost. The model of the organic whole thus disappears and the vitality of bodies can be rethought in terms other than those of proportion and symmetry. It is now conceived as a life that flows gently and without interruption, like sea waves, in a certain indifference that, according to Winckelmann, entails the “rupture of all specific relations between a sensible form and the expression of an exact meaning,” which is also a manifestation of movement in an indefinite inactivity (Rancière 2013a, 33). Thus emerges a movement that represents nothing, that does not tell a story or refer to an image, of which it would be a sign. And the image of the waves flowing into one another makes it possible to glimpse that tension of various corporealities in the same body, which will thereafter define beauty, according to Rancière (2013a, 9). Moreover, the Torso makes it possible to imagine a different community, an inevitably lost organic community, since it recognizes a definitely fragmented body and an unrecoverable unity, as well as a collective body that is no longer present, and, thus, forever deferred. Here the whole is not an expressive unitary body; it is mere outlines that flow into one another and is everywhere

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and nowhere. It is thus a quite different body from that of the festival that integrates everyone, that can recognize and confirm itself in sharing the same affective capacity, that communitarian body that Rousseau defended, according to a Platonic model, in his critique of the theater (Rancière 2013a, 16–17). The Torso presents neither a representable social body nor a community embodied without representation, but rather a “lost presence,” the presence of a power that “forged” it, but that is also lacking the necessary division of a community that has departed as a totality (Rancière 2013a, 18). This also seems to announce another way of conceiving freedom as the negation of “the opposition between activity and passivity” (Rancière 2013a, 17), as a rupture between a sensible expression and a precise meaning, as the break of any determinate link between that experience and a certain audience. It is the freedom of a reflexive, corporeal mobility that art can make possible by freeing the gaze from the codes of reception that ruled the experience of art. Therefore, the aesthetic revolution announced by Winckelmann’s reflections “reveals new potentials of the body for the art of tomorrow” (Rancière 2013a, 20; my emphasis), and displays other capacities and forms of configuration. The exposure to the affective power of inexpressiveness and the focus on the mutilation and fragmentation of the community open up the path for the proliferation of unprecedented bodies—bodies like those of Gauny, Irene, and so many anonymous invisible subjects that appropriate the power of images, of texts, of their gestural movements in the most ordinary tasks, in order to become others, to prove to themselves a power they had not recognized for themselves. Fragmented Bodies There was no longer any pose, group, or composition. Now there was only an endless variety of living planes, there was only life [. . .]. Rodin seized upon life as he saw it all around him [. . .]. No part of the body was insignificant or trivial, for even the smallest of them was alive. (Rilke, quoted in Rancière 2013a, 155)

According to Rancière’s reading of Rilke, the task that Rodin takes on is capturing life in its fullness as it displays itself anywhere, in any face, in any fragment of a body. Therefore, no part of the body is insignificant for the sculptor: they are all alive, as bodies permeated by time, by the present, the past, and unforeseen futures, as well as by the mysterious persistence of life that continues to vibrate on every surface. In fact, for Rodin, sculpture becomes “an art of planes,” a work with surfaces understood as “infinite encounters between things and light” (Rancière 2013a, 156–57), between things and the variable temporality of light. That is why there are only “­living planes” (154), and this life has to do with the temporality of the plastic surface. Therefore,

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according to Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture does away with Lessing’s opposition between spatial arts and arts of time, to the point that the poet takes the rhythm of his own writing from that “sculpture-time” (156). In Rodin, sculpture becomes a spatial art of time that strives to capture the rhythm of the development of life in surfaces, instead of previously given spatial or corporeal realities. The idea is not to shape the different attitudes of a body in different moments, or the possible actions of a given body, but rather to grasp the way in which bodies emerge, fracture, recompose, or decompose themselves in movement. Thus, “bodies do not act; from now on, actions constitute bodies” (Rancière 2013a, 157). There will no longer be a set of hierarchically organized bodies, but a multiplicity of disseminated fragments, a multitude in which each part is in itself a “complete individuality.” Thus, what Rilke finds surprising and new in Rodin is, according to Rancière, the manner in which the unfinished acquires “the potentiality of the whole” (160). That is why the sculptor deliberately creates figures without heads or limbs, like the Torso in the Belvedere, and, through that creation of incomplete bodies, rethinks the unity of the work, which can no longer be identified with the unity of a body (Rancière 2013a, 161). But, against the modernist credo, it is not that the work abandons mimetic unity to transform plastic art into a mere question of creating “forms, lines and volumes” (162). The question is not that of making those elements autonomous per se, but rather of “rendering the thousand manifestations of life autonomous and visible in bodies” (162). Indeed, strictly speaking, one cannot say that there are forms in Rodin’s surfaces, but rather, gestures, “attitudes, unities formed by multiple encounters of bodies with light and other bodies” (Rancière 2013a, 163). For this reason, what now gives rise to unity is not the acting subject, but movement. And, in this sense, unity can arise from hands without bodies, hands free of any organic function like indicating or grasping, hands that “bark” (162), rest, become tense, relax. Thus, bodies, their fragments, are seen as singular expressions of an “impersonal life” that vibrates on the sculpted surface (Rancière 2013a, 163). This life is felt as an “infinite power” (Rancière 2013a, 164) of mobility, of reconfiguration, of invention of forms, as a power that cuts across the movements and encounters of bodies, and as an immanent power that makes its rhythms vibrate in any fragment of the world. Plastic work is thus conceived as an activity that can extend the flow of life, inscribing the movement of bodies in its singular figures and surfaces, just as the new dance (Laban, Isadora Duncan, and Loïe Fuller) and the emerging cinema would do, though along different paths. Thus, these arts can pave the way for bodies to conceive themselves as unfinished, as bodies that, in the tact and contact with other bodies, other forms, gestures, and attitudes can recompose and reshape their unstable unity by exposing themselves to what is most trivial and invisible,

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to the most ordinary and quotidian, as that in which life also flows. Because, as Rilke said, All happiness that has ever thrilled the heart; all greatness that has nearly destroyed us with its force; every broad, transforming thought—was once nothing but the pursing of lips, the raising of eyebrows, the shadows on a face. (Rilke, quoted in Rancière 2013a, 163)

Unfindable Body In her serpentine dance, Loïe Fuller addresses the question of what a body can do and she shows it in different ways, along paths that suggest the “reinvention of the world” (Rancière 2013a, 98), and the reinvention of art. Hence the fascination she produced in many spectators of the time, including the poet Mallarmé. According to Rancière, the veil she uses in her dance is not only an artifice that allows her to recreate all sorts of forms (the flight of a bird, the swirl of a wave, the blossoming of a flower, a peacock’s tail fanning out); it is an artifice that manifests the potency of a body by avoiding its recognition or identification, that is “by hiding it” (96). In the veil, the body finds an artifice “to change its form and its function” (96). Thus, in her dance, Fuller wrests the body from the classical model of beauty, of the well-proportioned organic body, and invents a new body and different ways of extending it. It is a body in movement that is, at the same time, “the perpetual variation of the line” (95), a sinuosity that creates new forms by deploying itself in others. It is a “new body” that “engenders forms by placing itself outside itself” (96), by abandoning a stabilized form with each movement, by making itself a means of alteration. For this reason, Mallarmé describes the effect of this dance as musical. In his words, “the veil is music because it is the artifice through which a body extends itself to engender forms into which it disappears” (Rancière 2013a, 97). It is a material artifice, like musical instruments, used “to produce an immaterial sensible milieu” (97), which is rhythmical and allows “the transition from sounds to fabrics” (96) to be felt. The veil, then, allows the body to become “unlocatable” (97), as a body that is only visible in the “metamorphoses” it creates in its extension and disappearance, in those multiple forms it engenders through the artifice of its veiled movement. Thus, it is also a body that “produces its own space of apparition” (98), that makes appear the very act of appearing and disappearing of the forms of the world, of its “aspects” (Rancière 2013a, 98). This led some of her spectators to perceive a sort of “cosmogony” in her dance, as if she recreated the appearance and disappearance of forms, the capacity of nature to engender the configurations of the world (Rancière 2013a, 98–99).

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Mallarmé also suggests that Fuller’s body makes it possible to rethink the status and the work of fiction, beyond the representative model’s idea of verisimilitude. In Fuller’s unlocatable body, fiction is understood as “pure display of a play of forms” (Rancière 2013a,100), as “display of [. . .] apparitions” (94), which gives rise to a “writing of forms” (103). The body’s gestuality writes a space of forms, rhythmically altering spatiality, in such a way that her dance has to redefine all of the elements that give rise to her performance: staging, lighting, the architectural layout of the space (Rancière 2013a, 105), and, particularly, the use of projectors that follow the movement of that veiled body: “On stage, the light rays shaped the deployed veils into stars; they glowed the colours of the rainbow or set them ablaze, completing the disappearance of the body in the whirlwind of forms” (108). Electricity is thus fundamental for Fuller’s invention of a dance of light that stages the appearing and disappearing of both the most material and the most immaterial, volatile, or incorporeal forms. It is as if this dance of light made it possible to stage the incorporeal that we have talked about in different parts of this book, particularly in chapter 2: that sort of excess that cuts across corporeality and pushes it to foster, through its own more material bodily movement, qualitative transformations that cannot be fixed or stabilized in any given material order. And in that luminous dance, Fuller also reinvents art as “an art of the indistinction of the arts,” as an art that combines all the arts: “Before dance, there is movement; before painting, gesture and light; before the poem, the tracing of signs and forms” (Rancière 2013a, 106). As if dance, painting, poetry could be conceived as tracings of forms, inscriptions of gestures, “world-gestures,” outlines or marks of a power of production that, according to Rancière, brings to mind the Greek notion of physis, as the potential to make emerge, grow, appear, which creates appearance in the disappearance of its forms (Rancière 2013a, 106). It is the immaterial, incorporeal power of becoming another, which cuts across materiality as unstable virtuality that can only be actualized in difference, in that which is capable of differing from itself, exposing the present to what has not been, to the traces that make it absent. Fuller’s body makes it possible to imagine the virtual, incorporeal conditions of becoming, of that which is not actualized in any given form and which, in the texture of its materiality, immanently cutting across it, throws a body out of itself, above and below what it has been. 6.2.2. Bodies at the Limit of What They Can Do: Politics in the Films of Pedro Costa The figures we have examined thus far now make it possible to imagine, think, and feel other images of the social body as already always divided,



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another experience of freedom as corporeal movement, the unfinishedness and recomposition of bodies in dealing with what is most quotidian, and the manner in which those bodies can be conceived as constituted by virtuality. In line with the ideas developed throughout this book, we could say that these figures allow us to conceive the task of emancipation as a torsion of bodies and to affirm their common potency, what they can do. And Rancière would probably agree that discourses and practices, based on the recognition of the equality of intellects, take up the impulse of these aesthetic interventions, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Pedro Costa’s work is also very significant in this sense, and it is worthwhile to consider its singular aspects, in order to be able to address an issue I suggested earlier: art’s power to alter attitudes and realities. However, before addressing the specificities of Costa’s work, I would like to dwell on some of Rancière’s reflections on cinema, which are particularly appropriate for discussing the politicity of the Portuguese filmmaker’s work and his counter-consensual treatment of bodies. Like Loïe Fuller’s dancing, cinema involves the fusion of different artistic practices, especially literature and theater, and develops amidst “relationships between the power of words and that of the visible, between the sequences of stories and the movements of bodies, that cross the frontiers assigned to the arts” (Rancière 2014b, 12). Cinema presents the movement of bodies, bodies that act and suspend action, bodies that trace and live stories that can be told, and who also experience a world, touching and rejecting other bodies in the fissures and cracks of what can be told as a story. In this sense, cinema tends to occur at the intersection of two logics: on the one hand, the narrative logic of connected actions that constitutes a plot, and, on the other hand, the suspension of that narration, to a greater or lesser extent (depending on how experimental-aesthetic or, on the contrary, representative the film is) by affective, molecular, experiential moments in which nothing happens other than the opening up of perceptual, affective constellations, temporal traces, virtualities. On the one hand, we have “the narrative chain” from beginning to end, and, on the other, a “sequence of micro-events” with no beginning or end and that “does not obey that directed logic” (Rancière 2009d, 123–24). For this reason, Rancière finds useful Godard’s reformulation of Oliveira’s definition of cinema as “an overload of magnificent signs bathing in the light of the lack of any explanation for them” (Rancière 2014b, 18). It is the suspension of a regime of explanation that seeks to give meaning to a scene, an attitude, or an expression, in favor of another regime that lets the manifestation of something unfold as the virtuality of another possible world (see Rancière 2014b, 18–19). Cinema adopts this intersection of two different logics of literature, which can be seen in Flaubert’s novels, particularly in Madame Bovary, with its deployment “of

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the romantic principle of indeterminate significance or determined insignificance” (Rancière 2014b, 19): A young girl stands at a window, absorbed in contemplating beanpoles knocked over by the wind. She turns round and asks the visiting doctor what he’s looking for, though we didn’t know he was looking for anything. Two bodies brush against each other as they both grab a riding-crop. The next day the doctor is back. Nothing has been explained. (Rancière 2014b, 19)

These scenes, and many others, suspend the seamless continuity assumed by the representative regime among meaning, author’s intentionality, and expected effect on the reader. Thus arises a work of fiction that strives to produce openness, indetermination of sense, while at the same time paying attention to everything, to the possible meaning of anything, of any life without importance. Cinema, with its technical resources, can produce this regime of insignificant significance “naturally”; that is why Rancière believes it can be conceived as “an art that is ‘immediately’ Romantic” (Rancière 2014b, 20), although it is evident that many cinematographic works and practices affirm this virtuality very little. Those that do, however, are able to produce thinking images, that is, images that do not merely show and illustrate an action, but rather open, trigger, suspend or duplicate it (see Rancière 2009d, 123). Pedro Costa’s films, especially those comprising the so-called “Fontinhas Trilogy” (Ossos, 1997; No Quarto da Vanda, 2000; Juventude em Marcha, 2006), are a slow extension of such pensive images. Nothing is narrated, nothing happens in them that can be told as a story, no dramatic action is created or documented. What these films construct are affective and experiential spaces, dispositifs exploring collaboratively with the “natural actors” who are the characters the vital intensity of the devastated, fractured, sometimes spectral lives of immigrants from Cape Verde, marginalized white young man thrown into the world of drugs. They are dispossessed figures on whose world these films bestow a sensible richness, an affective complexity through which they wander, remodulating their sufferings in more or less destructive ways and confronting a reality that time and again responds with more abandonment and destruction. Costa creates elaborate images in order to provide an account of this vital intensity, through a work of fictional composition that involves using a small video camera and working with natural actors for long periods, even up to two years, and a very reduced team. As the director has highlighted in several of his interviews, this entailed long sessions and a significant number of takes for each scene, many times at the request of the natural actors.3 Time is, then, a fundamental factor in these films, which take time and in which one feels the intense work of bodies collaborating together. They are slow-paced films



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with static compositions and take that last several minutes, during which the suspension of chronological time and of any development is evident, as is the attention to spaces constituted by complicities, gestures, and subtle molecular details. They are spaces in which the understanding of the inhabited world and words having the power of restitution take place. Words happen amidst the physical ailments of a body numbed by drugs, in the case of Vanda, or of an errant figure like Ventura, an old, tired retiree that wanders aimlessly like a noble patriarch among the ruins of his now demolished former neighborhood and the aseptic walls of the housing project assigned to him. In these elaborate images, light effects, the profusion of low angles, the framing of the characters, sometimes like figures in a Baroque painting, sometimes like statues (especially in the case of Ventura), as well as the treatment of spaces and objects as in some shots of No Quarto da Vanda that achieve the texture of Vermeer paintings and allow for something very different form the problematic aestheticization of precarity (Rancière 2009d, 84). They make it possible to affirm the sensible, perceptual, and affective richness of the most precarized lives, and of lives that by assuming the role of actors in those films, affirm that richness for themselves, as well as the power of restituting it and making it evident for others. Herein lies the politicity of those films according to Rancière, as well as his distance from other ways of conceiving the political significance of cinema: Pedro Costa’s camera never follows the normal trajectory of moving his lens away from the places of misery to the places where those in dominant positions producing this misery live. Neither the economic power that exploits and relegates, nor the administrative and police power that represses or displaces populations, appear in his films. Nor do his characters ever state any political formulation of the situation or express rebellious feeling. (Rancière 2014a, 128)

These films offer no explanations of the precariousness of the existences they depict, no mobilizing impulse to push spectators from their alleged prosaic passivity to militant commitment. Rather, they seek to produce a certain art of equality “in which form is linked to construction of a social relation” and which asserts “a capacity for sharing or a shareable capacity” (Rancière 2014a, 137). This is achieved when all hierarchies among existences are erased (among human beings, between them and things), when each existence can assert itself with a complex density and sensible texture, even that which seems the most dispossessed, when the most beautiful words of love are available to anyone, as we can see through the figure of the letter in both Casa de Lava (1994) (prior to the trilogy) and Juventude em Marcha. The love letter which, in the first film, Edith has brought with her to Cape Verde to feel her imprisoned lover close to her is the appropriated, read, and reread

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by other characters in the movie, until it becomes a letter without an author or an addressee, which circulates “between literate and illiterate, sane and mad” (Rancière 2014a, 136). The letter, repeated once and again in Juventude em Marcha like a “refrain,” speaks about separation and reunion, the harshness of work, the promise of happiness irradiating from the figure of the loved one, and the dream of showering her with small gifts (Rancière 2014a, 136). Pedro Costa translates this letter by combining different languages (the letter of an immigrant worker and a poem by Robert Desnos) (Rancière 2014a, 136), which are considered to be translatable as the result of a common power of communication. According to Rancière, the politicity of these films is also found in the affirmation of this equality of capacities. Nevertheless, and this is something we still need to address, these films also evince a certain impotence of art. It is not just that art is unable to guarantee that it will foster the affective and reflexive mobility and the equality of capacities it strives to affirm in its dispositifs, because its effect is undecidable and cannot be predicted. The problem is also that of a certain incommunicability that halts the affirmation of a common power, “the flaw or failure that interrupts the justice of exchanges and the circulation of experiences” (Rancière 2014a, 139). Pedro Costa’s films allow us to see this fissure clearly by allowing to appear “in the circulation of bodies, concerns, words and music a dimension of the inexchangeable, the irreparable” (139). For this reason, Cinema cannot be the equivalent of the love letter or music of the poor. It must split Itself off; it must agree to be the surface on which an artist tries to cipher in new figures the experience of people relegated to the margins of economic circulation and social trajectories. (Rancière 2009d, 82)

Perhaps this is where the politics of art is played out today: in the creation of figures, images, ways of feeling and being affected that facilitate the assertion of other existences, other forms of corporeality, other parameters of the sensible, but without losing sight of the fact that its effect of appropriation, circulation, and transformation cannot be guaranteed.

6.3.  ANOTHER IMAGE OF TIME: HETEROCHRONIC BODIES Returning to the figure of Gauny, which was crucial in order to think the movement of emancipation as a torsion of a body (chapter 2), I would now like to highlight that such movement also entails the intersection of diverse temporalities and, hence, the configuration of a heterochronic experience. While carrying out his job, the carpenter-poet cuts across the linearly



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programmed time of productivity and efficiency with a time of suspension, of inoperancy, in which the present is fractured by traces of childhood refrains and by images of what is happening and not yet happening in his environment. These images show the sufferings of a certain present, as well as dreams of another possible world. In this heterochronic constellation, life is different and what has been fixed can be dislocated. That is why emancipation can also be conceived as putting “several times in one time,” as “combinations of times that are normally incompatible” (Rancière 2011c, 9). Forms of political subjectivization can also be constituted by this heterochronic combination of temporalities. Bodies that decide to act collectively in favor of unprecedented forms of equality and rearticulation of the common are often driven by traces of the past or a cultural heritage that they reinterpret and combine with other horizons of possibility that summon up unpredictable futures from the given parameters of sense. These experiences are a work of memory that asserts its practices of intervention, reconfiguration, and imagination of a past that drives a certain form of action that dislocates the present and outlines different futures. 6.3.1.  Memories in Conflict: The Possibilities of Docufiction To rethink the work of memory and its political effects counter-consensually involves asserting its conflicting character, as well as the virtualities of what could not be. It means allowing stories to appear, other than those reiterated and sedimented, embracing conflict in both what is said about the past and the manner in which it is constructed. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in his famous theses on history, history entails a task of construction.4 Specifically, the idea is that works of memory can allow the traces of silenced voices to be heard, without speaking for them or reproducing their muteness, but rather, making resonate their power and what they can do. Because with is important is precisely the power and indestructibility of desire, of what bodies can do amidst everything that crushes them and renders them impotent once again. In this respect, an example of docufiction comes to mind: Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (translated into French as Cronique Coloniale), which Rancière refers to in The Unforgettable (Rancière 2014b). This film goes beyond showing that there are unrepresentable things or that violence exceeds all assignment of sense. By reorganizing forgotten archival images (200 nitrate films taken between 1912 and 1933) taken in colonized Indonesia to “celebrate” the Dutch civilizatory endeavor, the film uses different juxtaposed resources to expose the traces of those violences, those violated figures and gestures and the pain they reveal. But it also evinces a certain “happiness” and “ease” on the part of the colonized when performing the tasks assigned to them, a kind of vital fluidity combined with indifference

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and dignity, displayed in unique gestures and rituals that seem to interrupt the civilizatory task. Their fluidity, impenetrability, and pride manifest the power of those bodies. In Rancière’s words, this work of memory expresses “the commonality of two worlds in the very gesture of exclusion; their separation in the commonality of one and the same image” (Rancière 2014b, 15). Thus, the film constructs the conflict it evokes through its tense heterogeneity, which produces possibilities of meaning yet refuses to assign full meaning or make sense, because all closure of meaning denies the conflictivity that makes it possible to reiterate the persistence of bodies and their multiple forms of appropriation of what can still be in the opening of what has been. Clearly, emphasizing this task of construction does not mean ignoring the facticity of what happened, the events themselves and their effects on a shared world. The idea is to show that what happened and affected different positions of sense has to be narrated in order to be remembered, and that all narration involves the construction of meaning. The question, then, is to what extent those constructions are able to embrace and convey the different traces left by events and the manner in which they can interpellate the present with their stories and affective vibrations. On the contrary, it is rather the consensual logic of facts and evidence that entails the possibility of negationism, since it questions precisely those traces or specters that the latter attempts to banish. We can then say that memory conceived in its conflictivity requires an aesthetic task of construction in which writing itself, the images it creates, and the use of other resources such as space, sound, and visual images embrace the singularity of the events and the manner in which they affect certain bodies. Therefore, when the idea is “not to explain the world or to discover its ‘conditions of possibility,’ but to formulate an experience of the world,” and “if the world is made in such a way that it can only be expressed in ‘stories’ and pointed to with the finger” (Ranciére quoted in Didi-Huberman 2016, 82), one could say that we need artistic and literary narration, and, in general, aesthetic practices. Indeed, the image, in aesthetic dispositifs, is understood as “a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid” (Rancière 2009d, 93), which, in its heterogeneity, allows a world conflict to appear, without resolving or reducing it, without neutralizing its singularity. In no way do I mean to say that only docufiction has this ability, but I do believe it offers significant resources to think the very status of fiction in constructions of memory, as well as the role of the image and counter-images in the consensual world of information. Indeed docufiction can take up materials produced for purposes of information, or historical materials that have been organized in a certain way, in order to disrupt the connection between the visual and the verbal used in the dominant forms of communication and historical narration. Thus, it can evince the way in which the resources used



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by these media to select and organize images, text, and sound distribute boundaries of sense. Such boundaries not only close off meaning and prevent reflection on oneself and the mobility of thought regarding the open possibilities and virtualities of the world but also produce impotent identities, or, as Rancière says, “nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without them elves having a chance to speak” (Rancière 2009d, 96). Thus, working with actual visual registers or archival materials, docufiction, with its singular concatenations and montages, is able to underscore the suspension of the reasons imposed by reality, in order to assert other reasons that allow it to be rethought. Aesthetic dispositifs such as docufiction, popular practices that assert the conflict of temporalities and lived experience, daily rituals of people, particular ways in which communities and social organizations construct memory (e.g., the forms of memory of the San José de Apartadó community of peace, the alabados and arullos of the Pacific region,5 the raps and street murals of Bogotá, etc.)—all of them alter or deviate from the established forms of discourse and information. And in this deviation, one comes into contact with the brutality and harshness and conflictivity of the reality of a world, only and precisely through these fictional interventions that destabilize and reorder the boundaries between the present and the absent, the real and the virtual. These deviations also express the manner in which pain touches us some times, in that undoing/dissolution that each one of us is also undergoing, despite the fact that we keep inventing resources to avoid accepting the fragility of life and the everyday care it requires. 6.3.2. Bodies That Challenge Their Victimization: Nicolás Rincón-Gillé’s Campo hablado (“The Spoken Countryside”) What I know is that an imaginary circle with well-defined boundaries has been drawn in order to separate them from the others: victims inside, everyone else outside. “We” are the outsiders, and those inside play the role of a “they.” Violence in our country has almost always been told in the third person plural. This grammatical use makes it possible, above all, to create a sense of security in order to go on with the war: don’t worry, sir; do not be alarmed, madam, bad luck is for others. This fable works because the boundary is described as insurmountable: “relax, nobody here goes from a ‘we’ to a ‘they’ just like that.” As if victims were predestined [. . .] as if people were born victims because they are poor, or peasant, or black, or female, etc. But that boundary does not exist. Violence hits us all, it is not a natural phenomenon. It is set up by some to create terror, destroy social bonds, by imposing the idea of an exclusionary society, led

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by owners of haciendas the size of a whole state. Above all, violence seeks to annihilate any possibility of feeling part of a vast, complex, and different social environment, in which we all feel equally affected. Violence and victimization seek to prevent the countryside from being the city, the rich from mixing with the poor, women from wanting to be like men, blacks from acting as if they were whites, homosexuals form having the rights heterosexuals have [. . .]. What I now know is that victims are living among us. We do not need to go to them. It is simply a matter of listening to the other, wherever we are, to all of the others. We are all the sons of the Mothers of Soacha. (Rincón-Gille interviewed by Diego Batle 2017b)

This is filmmaker Nicolás Rincón-Gille’s response to a Colombian journalist, who asked him, as if for a recipe, about the “10 steps to listen to a victim.” The journalist had probably verified, without examining the films in depth, that the protagonists of the trilogy Campo hablado were subjects who had suffered the violence of forced displacement, disappearance, and assassination of loved ones. What Rincón-Gille’s response—which was never published—and his trilogy evince, however, is that the objective of the films is to produce a work of memory of the multiple forms of violence occurring in the country, challenging victimization. They are counter-memory practices that refuse to continue producing the figure of the victim that we see from afar, that we distance from us by setting up boundaries between “us” and “them” so that their pain does not affect, disturb, or interpellate us. Establishing the victim as yet another dispossessed subject that we have to feel sorry for is, then, a mechanism that prevents ethical co-implication in the pain of others. It also closes off political imaginations’ capacity to think that such pain has been produced by and has to do with forms of relation and types of power and subjection that constitute and affect any inhabitant of this country. In the light of some of the themes pursued throughout this book, these words are also significant because Rincón-Gille recognizes that effect of distancing-identification and objectivization of the victim as one of the consequences of the violence that has occurred in Colombia. This violence has cut all ties between city and countryside, among the multiple social actors and sectors and the ways in which they mutually affect one another, thus producing bodies attached to certain roles and often stigmatized as “poor,” “black,” “peasant,” “woman,” “indigenous.” These bodies are denied the capacity to reject those identifications and be different. For this reason, what RincónGille seeks, to a great extent, in his films is to resist those forms of violence by fracturing those identifications, in order to construct a common sensorium that allows us to think, feel, speak with suffering bodies that co-implicate us in what has happened to them. But here “compassion is not pity for the unfortunate, it is the capacity to feel with them, which equally entails the capacity



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to make them feel with us, to constitute the sensorium of a capacity shared equally” (Rancière 2007b, 80). The orality of a countryside that tells itself, of “a countryside that appears when somebody narrates it” (Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017), has to do, precisely, with making possible the experience of this shared capacity. Because, as the filmmaker says, “Violence happened and we must rebuild on the basis of orality, of narration, because it is necessary to give meaning to life” (Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017). Thus, in the figures of these documentaries, we see bodies that have suffered terrible violences reconstructing the meaning of their lives, constructing oblique, subtle, sometimes more, sometimes less direct stories about what they have lived. Thus, they allow us to see their immense capacity to narrate, give meaning to their existences, and reconfigure them on a daily basis, also through their gestures, silences, and everyday tasks, which they carry out affirmatively, with great dignity, resisting any humanitarian, victimizing, or compassionate treatment. They are figures that speak to us amidst a landscape recreated by the filmmaker with all of the surrounding sounds in order to convey its life and its opacity as interwoven with the complexity and sensible, affective, and vital complexity of the characters. Thus, we hear the words “among the silences and the noises” (Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017), amplified by the landscape inhabited by the characters, which affects what they say and is also affected by what is narrated in its midst; “it is a living landscape that only speaks to us when we listen to those that know it” (Rincón-Gille 2017a, 17). The trilogy thus lets peasants who have suffered diverse forms of violence speak, without identifying them and from the complexity of their worlds and lives, “in order to make us feel their lived situation, while, at the same time, conveying their capacity to get out of it” (Rincón-Gille 2017a, 6). This is fundamental. In fact, the idea is to allow the singular experiences of these peasants to speak in their own voice, but not in order to “faithfully reconstruct what happened” or to identify “their own” voice, but to make evident the nonlinear, complex, conflictive manner in which these persons gather up their experiences. Therefore, according to Rincón-Gille, the films oscillate “between cruelty and poetry, constructing an imaginary that plays with the harshness of reality” (Rincón-Gille 2017a, 16), thus evincing that these figures are not human beings fixed by the violence imposed on them. On the contrary, they are bodies “capable of facing violence once again in order to give it a different meaning” (Rincón-Gille 2017a, 16), to show that life goes on after violence and is capable of reassessing and reinterpreting it. Given the above and as we had seen in the films of Pedro Costa, a significant influence on Rincón-Gille, these films, particularly the first and the last one, opt for a slow pace that installs a different gaze and a different way of listening, which make it possible to go through and attend to the sensible,

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affective richness of what is presented. They are stories that “come and go” and “do not end immediately.” According to the filmmaker, this is something that those films “in which we can listen more than in other contexts” “share with rural life” (Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017), a rural life constituted by words that make up a tradition that lives on, that does not close, that provides strength and nurtures broken dreams of times to come. Because, as Pasolini (quoted in Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017), another key reference for Rincón-Gille, says, tradition is “something capable of performing continuous and infinite transformations.” This tradition that is exposed to its neverending appropriation is above all a feminine world, as the first and last films show us. In Rincón-Gille’s words, Women are much more linked to oral tradition. They spend more time with their children, and, above all, they expose their pain more than men. What I mean is that they are not ashamed of showing their pain, anxiety, or trauma. Men usually try to present another image of themselves. Many of the male peasants I tried to film were not there in the present, in the place they inhabited. Violence had wrested something from them. Anyway, when I look around, when I look at the city, men try to hide their wounds, thinking that they can make them disappear that way. Women expose them, and, in that act of courage, they allow us to dry them in the wind. (Rincón-Gille 2017b)

In these films, we find female figures that expose their pain and embrace its most violent traces, not only in the stories they produce about what they lived but also in the way they carry out their daily practices, preserving everydayness through cares and rituals that sustain and affirm existence, weaving it with other traces and creating on the basis of their wounds, without trying to close or hide them. In the first film of the trilogy, En lo escondido, we have the marvelous and enigmatic figure of Carmen, the protagonist, speaking to us and representing some folk magic rituals that attempted to turn her into a witch and wife of Satan when she was a child, while we perceive the noise of the wind and the plantain leaves rustling with her words. We hear that all of that gave her the magic power of prediction. We then see Carmen praying before an altar with various saints, which Rincón-Gille illuminates faintly, as in a Baroque painting, and we follow her as she spends her days with a peaceful, somewhat sad and taciturn male figure that follows her instructions and steps, sometimes laughing with her. We see Carmen narrating the mistreatment inflicted by her mother, who also appears in the film, now old, massaging her daughter’s feet and talking to her. We see Carmen recreating, wittily and quite histrionically, the painful birth of one of her children, whom she saw as monstrous, unrecognizable. And we also see the bright colors of her green house, which she has evidently rebuilt or remodeled; we hear dialogues that cease to be audible;



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and we perceive the fog that shrouds the dense, green forests. Toward the end, Carmen, who has been presented to us as a witch, as a matron, as an active, smiling woman, in her multiple rural tasks, narrates how she started losing her magic when the paramilitaries arrived, how she was forced to abandon everything she had worked for, and how this sparked her great anger, indignation, and impotence at having to leave that place to which, despite everything, she has already returned (figure 6.1). Thus, through his dispositif, Rincón-Gille (2017a) manages to allow Carmen to give testimony of what she lived, while, at the same time showing herself “as she was: active, creative, capable of transforming her pain into something else” (26). The film proves that she is not merely a victim of violence but rather “a complex woman facing a violence that tries to reduce her to nothingness,” and in view of which she “somehow wins. At least she tells us that violence and her memory permeates us” (26). In Los abrazos del río, Rincón-Gille successfully reconstructs the figure of the river, the Magdalena river, which runs through the entire Colombian territory from south to north, and lets us hear the voices of fishermen and women from villages in the Magdalena Medio region. They start out by telling stories about the legend of the Mohán. This mythical figure who entangles the fishermen’s nets, making them fall sometimes, and seduces beautiful women, gradually ceased to appear when other apparitions emerged in the

Figure 6.1  Frame of En lo escondido by Nicolás Rincón-Gille

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river: massacred bodies floating down the river, often unrecognizable bodies that grew in number when the paramilitary groups arrived, according to one of the women, who began recording each dead body on small pieces of paper, as a sort of symbolic funeral or memorial she dedicated to each one of them. She also composed a story-poem about the situation. We also see the figures of relatives, especially, mothers, sisters, wives, who, in faltering words, their gaze empty, give testimony of the disappearance of those bodies, of their loss, their unending mourning, and of how the space of that mourning is inhabited by the specters of their loved ones who refuse to disappear, perhaps as a way of continuing to live with them in the present and into the times to come and thus gradually give meaning to the their meaningless loss (figure 6.2). Finally, in Noche herida, we experience the world of Blanca, a peasant woman who has been displaced to the city and lives in the southern periphery of Bogotá. But the film erases all of Blanca’s social labels; she refuses to be classified as “poor, displaced, peasant” (Rincón-Gille 2017a, 26). She is, above all, a grandmother that we can perceive as our own grandmother: dynamic, active, driven always by the concern to care for her grandchildren, especially Didier, her favorite, who seems to be at risk of disappearing in a violent city. We know this from stories told here, from Blanca’s constant worries, and, most of all, the repeated reference to social cleansing squads (perhaps the army itself, with its “false positives”?).6 But the violence of the city is also forgotten when we follow that woman’s daily labor in a house she organizes and manages as a farmhouse and which refuses to be read as “the house of a displaced woman” (Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017). Through her conversations and activities, this character is shown in her

Figure 6.2  Frame of Los abrazos del río by Nicolás Rincón-Gille



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becoming, always reshaping herself amidst the tough circumstances she is facing (Rincón-Gille and Stollbrock 2017), thus letting us see the persistence of life in the most ordinary activities of care. Blanca becomes through care, by sustaining life, like so many women in Colombia who have sustained life by providing daily care amidst the fractures produced by the forms of violence (figure 6.3). That is why the filmmaker says he found it so difficult to end the movie, to find an ending for such a dynamic character, until he finds the moment Blanca is lovingly bathing her great-granddaughter and then cradles her while she cries. At the end, Rincón-Gille tells us the film is dedicated to his mother and to the mothers of the young men from Soacha, murdered by members of the Colombian army as “false positives.” The film is thus a subtle homage to maternity, to the vital force of these female figures of care and struggle, despite everything. Rincón-Gille’s work thus lets us appreciate the fact that “it is not a question of removal but of redistributing the way we count. It is not a question of effacing what can be felt, but of multiplying the powers of producing what can be felt and making them intersect” (Rancière 2007b, 74). It is the way of seeing of subjects that demands from us another gaze at their experience and co-implication in their situation, that calls upon us to rethink how we live in an environment whose violences we also participate in as bodies exposed to the affective and vital complexities at play there, as well as to the work of mourning and necessary recreation of life required. Therefore, the politicity of these films and of the artistic practices I have considered here can be conceived as a double movement: first, the flaws that these dispositifs create in the given configurations of sense and its distancing, identifying,

Figure 6.3  Frame of Noche herida by Nicolás Rincón-Gille

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objectivizing boundaries, to give rise to intervals between the visible and the sayable, the imaginable and the thinkable, which are also “blows to perception or enigmas that do not need to be deciphered” (Quintana 2013b, 37). But at the same time, this work of destabilization and reconfiguration of the parameters of sense calls for feeling differently and involves the spectator in affective games that invite us to expose ourselves to those experiences of alteration and make them our own in their intangible, nonappropriable, and incommunicable character. Herein perhaps lies the power and impotence of art and its capacity to erase, interpellate, and implicate the self in that which undoes its restrained stability: in making it feel thrown into a field of affective forces that sometimes make it unrecognizable, that sometimes sustain it and at other times beleaguer it; discovering it as a body in the midst of other bodies, thrown into that unforeseeable, vibrant mediality of life in its conflictive temporality. NOTES  1. “ ‘It was’: thus is called the will’s gnashing of teeth and loneliest misery. Impotent against that which has been—it is an angry spectator of everything past. / The will cannot will backward; that it cannot break time and time’s greed—that is the will’s loneliest misery. / Willing liberates; what does willing plan in order to rid itself of its misery and mock its dungeon? / Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool! Foolishly as well the imprisoned will redeems itself. / That time does not run backward, that is its wrath. ‘That which was’—thus the stone is called, which it cannot roll aside. / And so it rolls stones around out of wrath and annoyance, and wreaks revenge on that which does not feel wrath and annoyance as it does. [. . .] This, yes this alone is revenge itself: the will’s unwillingness toward time and time’s ‘it was’ ” (Nietzsche 2006, 111).  2. In Rancière, the historical emergence of literature refers to the manner in which many nineteenth-century European works challenge the representational regime of art (see Rancière 2004c, 15–27).  3. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fkPvTCXADY.   4.  See, e.g., theses XIV and XVII of “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin 2003).   5.  In the Pacific region of Colombia, these popular songs (alabados and arrullos), include lullabies and songs to the saints and the dead. They are ritual in nature and constitute a form of mourning that expresses the violences people have suffered and call to those who are gone. Some examples may be found at http://www.­gotokmusic .com/gotokdice/articulos/art-57-7abri2017-arrullos-del-pacifico/art-57-7abri2017 -arrullos-del-pacifico.php.  6. Name given in Colombia to the extrajudicial executions carried out by the Colombian army during Álvaro Uribe’s second administration. They involved the assassination of innocent civilians who were then presented as dead guerrillas, in



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order to show results on the part of combat brigades who received monetary compensation for each dead guerrilla. This situation began to be exposed around 2006 by social activists, human rights advocates, and victims’ organizations, which gradually evolved into the “mothers of ​Soacha,” who began denouncing the death of their children after nineteen of them were found murdered in that municipality in 2008.

Epilogue: Politics, Bodies, Affects

(da capo) The fact that the meeting has been both missed and not missed is also what allows us to have a relationship with the event, with history. Which is not just the history of resentment. If the meeting is successful, it ends in resentment. If it’s missed, it ends in the disenchanted observation that it didn’t take place; if the meeting is both missed and successful, it means its power persists. —Rancière, The Method of Equality, 69. [. . .] making them laugh. But there’s laughter and then there’s laughter. There’s the sniggering of resentment. And there’s the laughter of those who have been able to come through a certain historic experience and to learn to measure what words mean, but without resentment. —Rancière, The Method of Equality, 92. And who could know how to laugh well and live well? —Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 324

A book such as this one cannot close, because its aim is to leave open paths of reflection that entail and require an intense task of political experimentation. In fact, by rereading Rancière’s thought and his understanding of emancipation on the basis of corporeality and the diverse practices it can carry out in order to de-subject itself and create new forms of experience in our current circumstances, what I have tried to show throughout the book is the experimental character of this task and of the thought that suggests it. My interest was to make evident the manner in which Rancière’s aesthetic-cartographic 239

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methodology fosters this experimental understanding of politics and encourages works of composition with actors, practices, and discourses that affirm or explore the equal capacity of anyone in different forms. Likewise, I focused on highlighting how this approach to the intersections between individual and collective forms of emancipation makes it possible to pay attention to the multiple dispositifs through which bodies are able to produce qualitative transformations of themselves and their ways of relating, which can have significant effects on their everyday practices and the forms of shared existence that make up a common world. Viewing emancipation as a process that takes place in daily life through invisible, anonymous practices and collective expressions that can be more visibly inscribed in state and social institutions implies an understanding of temporality as an open and conflictive dimension that dislocates consensualism’s confidence in what there is, in what is, in what was and is already closed. In fact, from the very beginning, I have been interested in suggesting and demonstrating, in different ways, that the affects circulating among bodies, the way in which they affect and can be affected by one another, their forms of perception and desires, are linked to the manner in which those bodies situate themselves with respect to temporality, to what happens and its traces of the past, and to the way in which they can open up or close off promises of things to come. In the first quote that introduces this epilogue, the connection between historicity and affects emerges from a perspective that makes it possible to revisit and tie up certain topics that appeared at the beginning of this book. I am referring particularly to the issue of resentment and to Rancière’s idea that this is the affectivity produced by consensus, which evinces a tacit and unexplored connection with Nietzsche and his early critiques of democraticliberal confidence in the progress of his time. What Rancière suggests in that quote is that resentment is not so much an affect of disappointment and pain over what did not take place, but rather, an affect that incubates the feeling that the events did happen and were. They are now closed, dead, dispossessed of all power of extension, incapable of spilling out into paths that announce possibilities that have not been but can be. In chapters 3 and 6, I suggested that resentment,1 as that immunitarian affect of hatred and rejection of an other that is blamed for one’s own suffering, the immunitarian affect that produces the definition of oneself on the basis of the prior definition of an other as rejectable, may have something to do with this closed and nonconflictive understanding of temporality. However, we need to return to this idea. As Nietzsche rightly saw, that hatred is also anger at not being able to want in retrospect, at not being able to undo what is done, at having to be thrown into what was and already always is. It is the experience of a certain impotence, of already not being able to, which



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becomes a mockery of and unbelief in anything that aspires to be differently. It is important to return to this because, as I have suggested, the world we inhabit, the opinions and rumors circulating in the streets, the surveys that produce the so-called “public opinion,” the results of electoral politics are full of those affects that always blame an other (liberal-progressive individuals, immigrants, homosexuals, guerrillas) for the lacks and sufferings that besiege us. Today, we have firsthand experience of these affects that, as we saw throughout the book, close themselves off from the dimension of codependence, fragility, and capacity of alteration of life, and remain anchored in a fixed identity, an angry blaming that does not evolve.2 The figures we have seen appear in these pages, from philosopher-­ carpenter-poet Gauny, the workers of Proletarian Nights, Irene, the characters on the verge of the most radical dispossession in Pedro Costa’s films, Carmen and Blanca, those proud and friendly female survivors of Rincón-Gille’s documentaries, the members of diverse social movements whose testimonies I have gathered at different points of the book, are figures that resignify and reinterpret the violences they suffer, as both shared and singular, incommunicable pains. These are pains that require a change of life and the more or less explicit, more or less active, more or less visible imagination of other possibilities of being in the world. They are figures that twist resentment around in order to live their pain without that blaming affect, bearing their pain in their silences, in their more or less unhurried pace, in the fissures that open up worlds that could be seen as merely devastated by their unrelenting violences. They are figures that cut across historicity and expose themselves to its conflictive character, to its impossible closing off, thus opening up intervals between what has been achieved and what has been frustrated, between the minimal possibilities they encounter and those that have been unable to be. They are figures that despite everything, and in the most difficult conditions, laugh at the arbitrariness of their subjections and affirm, even in their most trivial gestures, their capacity to be amidst their impotence and inoperancy by unfolding it and filling it up with their everyday cares. Their laughter is that Nietzschean laughter of dance, the laughter of bodies that laugh in the midst of that which crushes them, amidst—and not beyond it by hiding or denying it. They are figures that evince how that impotence can be inhabited by traces, words, images, heterogeneous desires that dislocate it, move it, take it outside itself, alter it, and show it to be also constituted by subtle, unexpected powers. It is thus, to a great extent, a question of affects, of forms of perception, of ways of inhabiting historicity in being with others, of experimental practices, that is, of that politics of bodies that Rancière’s thought makes possible. The idea is to stop thinking the aesthetic-affective as a complement of rationality (as in Schiller’s aesthetic politics), or as that which makes it possible to move the people, the popular sector, thus implicitly and problematically

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distinguished from a rational, nonpopular other, since affects cut across the most elevated reasons and the most “disaffected” dispositifs. Therefore, an aesthetic exploration of politics such as that proposed here does not aim at finding affects able to sensitize the best reasons and make institutions more sensitive and human; neither does it seek passions capable of attracting sympathizers to egalitarian causes promoted through emotional discourses or charismatic figures. This is what we have seen over and over again, and it is also what right-wing populisms and electoral marketing campaign directors assume. Perhaps historical experience (the histories of movements, organizations, uprisings, and revolutions) can also show us other things, for example, that the best reasons people find to defend their causes of justice and the more egalitarian institutions that have been created have involved a prior work with affects and perceptions. That is, the shaping of affects and perceptions that make it possible to think differently and assert other networks of interdependence, subsequently channeled through the voice of a leader or a structured organization. Perhaps it is a job that is being carried out and a job that still needs to be done: one that has left localized traces and marks that can be recovered, reutilized, reexperimented, thus avoiding the dangerous zero point of so many theoretical models and so many delocalized discursive productions. For now, we need to think from the bottom up, horizontally, and in several directions, experimenting with thought, destabilizing disciplinary boundaries and consolidated delimitations of knowledge among academics and social actors. We need less top-down, project-oriented, modeling political theory and more attention to what is happening here and now, in the less visible intervals that gradually fracture the solidity of the present, to what is happening here and now, once again despite everything, in the persistence of events that have and at the same time have not taken place. This attention, this listening of a thinking of contingency has also driven the modest exercise of political experimentation I have pursued throughout these pages. It is an unfinished exercise, which is only the extension of other exercises, waiting to be prolonged, without any possible continuity or anticipation, perhaps fragmentarily and unforeseeably. NOTES  1. As analyzed lucidly by Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, chapter 1. I believe that Nietzsche’s reading of resentment grasps an immunitarian, reactive logic of identification that requires the prior disfiguration of the other in order to affirm oneself. This affect is different from hatred and the incapacity to forgive that



Epilogue: Politics, Bodies, Affects 243

can be felt toward the one who has harmed you (which Jean Améry considers to be resentment), and which can be displayed in practices that modulate that hatred (e.g., Améry’s own writing practice). The hatred of resentment is only unloaded by blaming an other; the disfiguration of the other seems to be its only creation. This is the Nietzschean resentment I am referring to here, as opposed to the moral feeling invoiced by Améry.  2. Without referring to Nietzsche’s analyses, Catherine Cramer has recently explored manifestations of this reactive logic and affectivity in her book The Politics of Resentment.

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Index

Abensour, Miguel, 175–76 aesthetics, 13, 28, 30, 215; aestheticcartographic method, 13–14, 16–17, 31, 40, 73, 78n4, 81, 98–99, 108, 165, 239–40; aestheticization, 225; aesthetic logic, 211, 215–17; aesthetic regime, 13, 20, 120, 215–16 affects, 1–4, 8–12, 14, 16, 19, 24, 30, 34, 36, 38–39, 46, 54, 56–59, 61–62, 68, 73, 93, 96–97, 102–4, 131, 134, 144, 151, 153, 155–56, 193, 211, 215–17, 231, 239–43 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 19n6, 159n10 Agee, James, 211–12, 214 agreement, 6, 97–98, 100–102, 123, 205; peace, 6, 8–9, 11 Althusser, Louis, 2, 25, 32, 42n3, 43n11, 93 the/an animal, 9, 34–36, 80, 93, 125–27, 149, 152, 179–80, 214–15 anti-violence, 159n12, 205–6, 208n15 appropriation, 12, 48–50, 53, 57–58, 64, 86–87, 122, 150–51, 153, 155, 190, 192, 194, 197–98, 226, 228, 232 Arendt, Hannah, 91–92, 122, 132, 169, 175, 182, 196, 200–201, 203 Aristotle, 91–92, 125, 129, 201

assemblages, 25–28, 40, 42n4, 57–59, 61, 63, 73, 97, 103, 108, 125, 134, 140, 149, 168, 180 Athanasiou, Athena, 4, 12, 82 autonomy, 16, 43n12, 68, 89, 93, 122, 163–65, 169–70, 172–73, 195 Balibar, Étienne, 16, 113n13, 141, 144, 159n12, 165, 202–6, 207n5 Belvedere, Torso, 211, 218–20 Benjamin, Walter, 203, 211, 227 Black Communities Process. See Proceso de Comunidades Negras de Colombia (PCN) body, 1–6, 9–17, 18n1, 19n2, 19n4, 19n6, 20n7, 20n13, 24–28, 30–33, 35, 37–40, 42, 43n6, 43n9, 45–73, 75–76, 77n3, 78n5, 78n7, 79–82, 87, 91–92, 94, 96–97, 99, 102–11, 113n16, 113n20, 120–22, 124–32, 134, 136, 138–39, 144–46, 148–49, 151–56, 158, 163, 167–69, 175–77, 180–81, 191, 195, 200, 205, 207, 209–11, 214–31, 234–36, 240–41; dispossession of, 12, 77, 79, 82, 110, 191; heterochronic, 226–27; organic, 13–14, 56, 58, 113n20, 129, 163, 216, 218, 220–21; power of, 3, 65–66, 72, 113n16, 136

259

260

Index

Bolivia, 16, 150, 160, 164, 186–91, 195, 197, 200 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 19n3, 32, 47, 56, 78n9, 93, 113n21, 128, 130 Brown, Wendy, 7–8, 15, 73, 83, 86, 88–97, 101, 112n11, 113n13, 113n19 buen vivir. See good living Butler, Judith, 5, 9, 12, 19n3, 20n9, 40, 44n18, 46, 82, 171, 179–80 capital, 7, 67, 76, 81, 84, 87, 89–90, 101, 143, 149, 157, 174, 195, 197 capitalism, 2, 5, 7, 12, 42, 76, 79, 81, 86–87, 90, 98, 102, 112nn3–4, 143, 149–50, 187–88, 192, 197, 208; anticapitalist struggle, 149; capitalist elites, 84; capitalist logic, 149; capitalist practices, 143; capitalist productivity, 75; capitalist relations of production, 143; capitalist societies, 3, 5 cartography, 15, 23–24, 29, 77n3, 119; aesthetic-cartographic method, 13–14, 16–17, 31, 40, 73, 78n4, 81, 98–99, 108, 165, 239–40; cartographic analysis, 13, 25 Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 120, 190, 207n3 citizen, 8, 183–84, 186, 200, 207; ethos, 184, 207n6 citizenship, 8, 83, 114n21, 172, 184, 205 civility, 202, 205 CNA. See Coordinador Nacional Agrario (CNA) Cochabamba, water war in, 191, 193, 197, 208n9 Colombia, 6–8, 11, 20n11, 36–37, 44n17, 80, 95, 107, 112n6, 113n18, 123, 128, 134, 137, 146, 150–53, 155–57, 158n2, 160n26, 163, 204, 230, 233, 235, 236nn5–6 the common, 13, 15–16, 24, 28, 30, 39–40, 54, 77, 80, 87, 96, 98, 103–4, 120–21, 123–25, 129, 134–35,

146–47, 152, 155, 157, 158n4, 164, 166–67, 169, 176–77, 179–202, 204, 208n14, 227 community, 24, 27, 30, 34, 39, 99–101, 103–6, 122–23, 125–28, 131, 136, 145, 149, 151–54, 157, 160nn24–25, 174–75, 183–84, 192, 194–95, 199, 201–2, 205, 217–19, 229; of consensus, 100–101; local, 7, 37, 96, 151; political, 34, 99, 122–23, 126–28, 201, 216–17 Community of Peace of San José de Apartadó (SJA). See San José de Apartadó Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó. See San José de Apartadó conflict, 16, 25, 29–30, 35–36, 43n11, 55, 94, 97–99, 110–11, 123–34, 140–44, 147, 155, 164–65, 174–75, 177, 183, 185–96, 200–202, 204–7, 227–29; political, 10, 124, 130, 133, 141–42, 170, 183; social, 10, 134, 143, 147, 157, 165, 179, 185, 196, 201, 204–5 Congreso de los Pueblos (Peoples’ Congress), 20n11, 151–52, 158n2, 163 consensualism, 5–6, 15, 19, 77, 82, 97, 100, 102–3, 107, 112n10, 113n16, 117, 119, 126, 134, 140–41, 155, 157, 163, 180, 240; consensual dispositifs, 16, 19, 211; consensual logic, 25, 76, 79, 95, 97–101, 103–5, 108, 111, 152, 201, 211, 228; consensual order, 104–7, 123, 133 consensus, 79, 90, 94–95, 97–102, 104–8, 111, 112n9, 112n12, 121–22, 124, 127, 142, 149, 174, 181, 184–85, 189–91, 205, 240; community of, 100–101; law of, 101–2, 119–20 Coordinador Nacional Agrario (CNA), 20n11, 80, 151 corporeality, 1, 3–4, 6, 10, 12, 14–15, 18n1, 23–24, 27–28, 30, 33, 36, 38, 40, 42, 46–47, 52–53, 58, 66, 73, 76,



Index 261

77n3, 93, 97, 146, 180, 218, 222, 226, 239. See also incorporeality Costa, Pedro, 211, 222–26, 231, 241 counterviolence, 141, 203–6 critical agency, 5–7, 9, 53, 85, 89, 209 critical dispositif, 3, 42, 94, 107, 120; post-critical dispositif, 2, 5 critical theory, 2–3, 18n2, 19n5, 76 culture, 10–11, 85, 100, 103, 134–35, 149, 158n4, 160n25, 160n28 Dardot, Pierre, 16, 84, 88, 112n3, 197–202, 208n14 Das, Veena, 32–33 Debord, Guy, 2, 107 dedemocratization, 7, 88, 90–97 de-identification, 25, 55–56, 58, 74 Deleuze, Gille, 11, 118, 181, 206, 210 democracy, 6–7, 16, 90, 93–95, 103, 113n13, 117, 120, 123, 142–43, 152, 154, 157, 164, 168–69, 171–76, 188, 194, 200, 205 democratization, 91 depoliticization, 8, 82–84, 141, 174–75, 179 Derrida, Jacques, 113n21, 211 desire, 2, 4, 9–12, 15, 51–53, 57, 59, 62–64, 66–67, 73, 83, 111, 119, 156, 161n31, 163, 227 De Sousa, Boaventura, 133, 186–89, 207n7 disagreement, 15, 24, 27, 30–42, 96, 101, 108, 117, 121–25, 133, 140–42, 147–49, 166, 199, 204, 206; logic of, 15, 25; political structure of, 27, 147, 160n23 displacement, 13, 23, 27, 30, 31–35, 38, 47, 52–54, 56, 65, 71, 74, 108, 118–19, 131, 138, 142, 189; forced, 37, 230 dispositif, 1, 3, 5, 12, 14, 16, 19, 25–26, 39, 42n3, 105, 143, 152, 155, 159n11, 159n19, 164–65, 173, 193, 202, 217, 224, 226, 233, 235, 240, 242; aesthetic, 212, 228–29; consensual,

16, 19, 211; critical, 3, 42, 94, 107, 120; of disagreement, 199; political, 159n11, 191; post-critical, 2, 5 dispossession, 5, 12, 15, 54, 76–77, 79–82, 84, 86, 89–90, 100, 121, 155, 157, 163, 187, 241; of bodies, 12, 77, 79, 82, 110, 191; of territories, 5, 36, 80–81 dissensus, 24, 30, 39–40, 47, 99, 134 distribution, 25, 27, 30, 34, 39, 42n4, 47, 52, 80, 93, 99, 104, 122, 124–30, 135–40, 144, 167, 172, 193, 195–96, 200, 205; of the common, 104, 125, 147, 167; police, 25–27, 34; of sense, 63, 78n12, 81, 109, 126, 129, 136, 149; of the sensible, 4, 13, 24–25, 27, 30, 35, 42n3, 104, 98, 107, 117, 124, 129–30, 144, 211 docufiction, 227–29 domination, 1, 3, 8, 14, 26–28, 33, 37, 40, 43n12, 51, 53, 59, 66, 75, 77, 78n5, 78n12, 81, 91, 93, 112n11, 121, 128, 131, 137, 140, 165, 175–77, 185, 200, 204, 207nn4–6 écart (gap-interval), 21, 28, 42n4, 43n12, 47, 63, 72, 123, 125, 139, 166 economy, 31, 67, 75, 101–2, 128, 160n25, 192; cenobitic, 66–67, 75, 92; of freedom, 66–69 education, 11–12, 77n1, 81, 86–87, 89, 93, 104, 133, 179 elite, 83–85, 90, 127, 153 emancipation, 2–6, 8, 13–15, 19n2, 20n13, 23–33, 38–40, 43n12, 45–48, 53, 63, 65–67, 74, 76–77, 78n10, 111, 115, 134, 149, 165, 207n7, 223, 226–27, 239–40; forms of, 5, 13, 16–17, 23–24, 27, 31, 33–34, 39–40, 42, 177, 240; intellectual, 13, 15, 23, 30, 32–33, 38–39, 43n9, 45–47, 61, 69, 72, 75; political, 13, 23, 38–39, 45, 74, 103; practices of, 1, 12, 14, 16, 23, 45, 115, 169, 172–73, 175, 179, 185, 187, 199, 205

262

Index

equality, 12, 30, 33–34, 39, 47, 55, 60, 64–65, 77, 87, 89, 92–94, 111, 113n16, 120–21, 124–25, 131, 135–37, 142–43, 147–48, 154–55, 158n4, 159n14, 165–66, 168–73, 177–79, 184–85, 188, 196, 207n4, 223, 225–27; forms of, 9, 25, 27, 39, 120, 147–48, 154, 168, 185, 188, 227; method of, 15, 17, 119–21 Errejón, Íñigo, 186, 189–91 Escobar, Arturo, 33, 40, 139, 158n4, 160n26, 163 Esposito, Roberto, 19n6, 181 ethos, 184–85, 207n6 Europe, 79, 88, 113n18, 117, 134 Evans, Walker, 211–12, 214 exclusion, 5, 30, 38, 76, 94, 99–100, 123, 132, 139, 143, 159n10, 180, 187, 200, 205–6, 228–29 experimentation, 18, 40, 46, 136, 138, 149, 155, 157, 164, 166, 181, 186, 197, 199–201, 206; experimental character, 40, 158n4, 239; experimental effort, 148; experimental practices, 1, 241; political, 15, 17, 164, 239, 242 exploitation, 31, 39, 67, 74, 81, 188, 204 FARC. See Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) Fernández, María Inés, 33, 40, 43n13 fiction, 72, 108, 130, 142, 171, 211, 222, 224, 227–29. See also docufiction Foucault, Michel, 7, 19n3, 19n5, 26, 42n3, 43n6, 76, 78n7, 78n12, 87, 89–91, 112n11, 118 France, 103, 105, 113n18, 114n21, 132, 134, 147 freedom, 7, 39, 49, 53–54, 62, 65–69, 81, 85–86, 89, 91–94, 100, 103, 125, 129, 168, 173, 177, 180, 185, 206–7, 219, 223

Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 6, 123, 156 Fuller, Loïe, 211, 216, 220–23 gap, 28, 30–31, 42n4, 43n12, 54, 63, 73, 99–100, 129–30, 137–40, 147, 165, 173–75, 184, 204, 206. See also écart (gap-interval) Gauny, Louis Gabriel, 32–33, 47–54, 57–58, 61, 66–68, 72–73, 75–76, 78n5, 78n7, 87, 92, 118, 158n5, 166, 219, 226, 241 good living (buen vivir), 81, 96, 149–55, 160n24 governmentality, 19n5 Guattari, Felix, 11, 199 Gutiérrez, Raquel, 16, 40, 159n13, 160n23, 187, 189–96, 208n11 Habermas, Jürgen, 97, 113n15, 129, 140–41, 145, 184, 205, 207n6 Harvey, David, 15, 81, 83–88, 90–91, 97, 101–2, 113n19 heterochrony, 16, 30; heterochronic bodies, 226–27; heterochronic practices, 37; heterochronic works, 221 heterogeneity, 14, 16, 24–27, 57, 65–66, 69, 73, 106, 108–10, 120, 145, 165, 176, 206, 228 heterology, 140; heterological, 43n7; heterological character, 176; heterological community, 37; heterological crossing, 150, 166; heterological intervention, 26; heterological logic, 135; heterological nature, 14; heterological scene, 35 heterotopia, 27–28, 43n6, 59–60 Hilb, Claudia, 183 the human, 5, 9, 36, 44n16, 81, 93, 147–49, 151, 157, 180, 202, 215 human being, 34, 44n16, 61, 80, 90, 125–26, 148, 150, 183, 197, 200, 202, 213, 225, 231



Index 263

identity, 1, 5, 10–11, 25, 27–28, 30–31, 41, 55, 74, 80, 85, 100, 104–6, 113n21, 131, 134–39, 142–44, 170, 181, 189, 218, 241 ideology, 2, 19, 84–85, 91, 93, 97, 102 illusion, 108, 25, 59–60, 93 imagination, 13, 16, 48, 51–52, 54, 62, 186, 211, 217, 227, 230, 241 IMF. See International Monetary Fund (IMF) immunitarian logic/approach, 6, 9–10, 19, 93, 102–5, 107, 134, 204, 206, 215, 240, 242n1 inclusion, 36, 41, 76, 95, 98–100, 102, 104–5, 123, 139, 159n10, 180–81, 205 the incorporeal, 43, 47, 59, 65, 71–73, 78n4, 96, 108, 146, 222 incorporeality, 51, 61 inequality, 6, 11, 33, 38–39, 55, 63, 77, 78n12, 83–84, 94, 107, 133, 154–55, 165–66, 172, 177, 204, 206, 207n4 injustice, 37, 128, 146, 158n3 instability, 14, 39, 108, 167, 170, 189 institution, 4–7, 16, 39, 90, 120, 130, 132–33, 135, 138, 144, 146, 155, 157, 163–79, 181–82, 184, 186–87, 192–200, 202, 204–6, 242; financial, 87, 98, 112n7; para-state, 7; popular, 157, 166, 170, 177; representative, 6, 171, 174; social, 60, 170, 178, 196, 204, 206, 240; state, 15, 36, 41–42, 88, 98, 147, 156, 164, 168, 170, 177–78, 182, 185, 189, 196, 204, 206, 240 institutionalism, 165, 168, 188 institutionalization, 165, 173, 178, 199 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 86–87, 195 interstice, 29, 31, 42n4, 43n8, 47, 51, 53–56, 60, 63, 130, 139, 175 Jacotot, Joseph, 59–63, 65, 74–75, 111, 166 Jaramillo, Pablo, 138 juridicalization, 101–2, 174, 188

justice, 11, 37, 95, 100, 104, 125, 127–28, 142, 158n3, 173–74, 201, 226, 242 Kant, Immanuel, 50, 52 knowledge, 2–3, 9, 11, 15, 24, 28, 33, 57, 63–64, 74, 76, 86, 93–94, 98, 102, 121, 124, 139, 149–50, 152, 156, 160n25, 242 Laclau, Ernesto, 44n19, 142–43, 160n22, 181, 190–91, 208n15 language, 5, 17, 31–32, 36, 38, 40, 46–48, 55, 60–61, 63–64, 68, 103–4, 126, 128–32, 137, 145, 202, 213, 226 Latin America, 117, 134, 136, 145, 150 Laval, Christian, 16, 84, 88, 112n3, 197–202, 208n14 logic: aesthetic, 211, 215–17; consensual, 25, 76, 79, 95, 97–98, 101, 103–5, 108, 111, 152, 155, 201, 211, 228; of construction of the common, 190, 192, 195–96, 164; of disagreement, 15, 25; dissensual, 25; egalitarian, 25, 35, 111; hierarchical, 25, 217; of ideology, 85, 93; immunitarian, 105, 242n1; of inclusion, 76, 98, 100, 104; police, 13, 25, 27–28, 57, 99, 103, 108, 125, 148, 176; of politics, 25, 166 logos, 34–35, 92, 126–32, 147 Mallarmé, Stephane, 211, 221–22 Marxism, 37, 122; Marxist approach, 91; Marxist critique, 103; Marxist discourse, 85, 150; Marxist logic, 85; Marxists readings, 31; Marxist understanding, 83 materiality, 12, 29, 47, 49, 54–60, 65, 67–68, 73, 78n4, 97, 108, 128, 132, 153, 166, 218, 222 media, 7, 9, 107, 109, 111, 209–10, 229 memory, 62, 152–53, 211, 227–30, 233 Mexico, 160n26, 163 microfascism, 11

264

Index

micropolitical level, 30–33, 38 Morales, Evo, 186, 189–90 Mouffe, Chantal, 44n19, 141–44, 181, 190, 208n15 Myers, Ella, 20n14, 77n2, 164–68, 172–73 narrative, 6, 9–10, 12, 37, 49, 55–56, 87, 110–11, 118, 128, 186, 189–91, 223 nature, 2, 9–10, 14, 19n4, 34, 36, 39, 43n8, 62, 68, 70, 81, 93, 111, 125, 138, 149–52, 155, 157, 160nn24–25, 160n28, 179, 183, 221, 236n5 neoliberalism, 5, 10, 15, 19, 79–80, 82–84, 86, 88–93, 97, 102, 113n19, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 93, 210, 236n1, 240, 242n1 the nonhuman, 5, 81, 149, 151, 197, 202, 215 nonviolence, 125, 130, 203–4 opinion, 35, 96, 105–7, 122, 170, 184, 211, 241 oppression, 128, 204 organic body, 13–14, 56, 58, 113n20, 129, 163, 216, 218, 220–21. See also body organism, 13, 20n7, 58, 200 organization, 2, 14, 30, 40–41, 89, 112n2, 123, 131, 134, 138–39, 148, 150, 152–53, 155, 157, 163–68, 173, 175–76, 181, 186, 188–89, 193–95, 200–202, 242 PCN. See Proceso de Comunidades Negras de Colombia (PCN) Peoples’ Congress. See Congreso de los Pueblos Plato, 56, 89, 101, 125, 183, 185, 219 poetics, 23, 28 the police, 26–27, 34, 99, 108, 113n21, 125, 145, 148, 159n12, 160n21, 165–66, 176

police logic, 13, 25, 27–28, 57, 99, 103, 108, 125, 148, 176 policy, 6–7, 39, 80, 83–87, 100, 104, 112n9, 135, 158n4, 188, 194–95 political subject, 8, 15, 28, 34–35, 106, 123, 134–36, 146, 178–79, 190, 199, 205 political subjectivization, 5, 13, 15, 30–31, 33, 35–39, 74, 117, 121, 136–40, 149, 179, 181, 217, 227 politics, 5–7, 10, 12–13, 18, 20n13, 24–26, 30, 44nn13–16, 57, 80, 99, 109, 113n17, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 130, 135, 142, 157, 159n10, 159n19, 165–67, 171–76, 182, 184, 187, 195, 197, 200, 202–4, 222, 226 potency, 4, 9–10, 12–15, 17, 31, 47, 49, 51, 55, 63, 110, 119, 221, 223 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 20n12, 33, 86–88, 110 power, 1–4, 8–9, 11–12, 20, 36, 43n9, 54, 57–66, 69–73, 76–77, 78n7, 83–85, 88–91, 93, 95–96, 99, 109–10, 113n21, 118, 120, 143, 146, 151, 153, 155–56, 163, 167–78, 182, 184–87, 190–91, 194–96, 198, 200, 202, 205, 210–13, 219–20, 222–23, 225–28, 230, 232, 235–36, 239–41; of bodies, 3, 65–66, 72, 113n16, 136; common, 7, 9, 28, 47, 62–64, 66, 76, 81–82, 113n16, 136, 170, 196, 207, 226; of decision, 8, 95, 185; forms of, 40, 78n12, 81, 84, 91, 93, 112n11, 143–44; state, 85, 168, 187; of words, 57, 60, 125, 131, 223 privatization, 82–86, 98, 102, 152, 157, 179, 192, 195, 204 Proceso de Comunidades Negras de Colombia (PCN), 20n11, 137, 139 rationality, 3, 7, 9–11, 63, 68, 72–73, 83, 87–91, 95, 97, 122, 124–25, 141–42, 149, 151, 155, 241 reality, 1, 4, 19n5, 26–27, 50, 53–54, 59, 69, 72, 76, 85, 94, 98–100, 107–10,



Index 265

113n16, 113n21, 117–18, 142, 195, 198, 211, 213, 220, 223–24, 229, 231 relationality, 9, 11–12, 40–41, 97, 103, 151, 153, 155, 180, 213 representation, 7, 70, 110–11, 170, 174–77, 181, 190–91, 194–95, 200, 211 republicanism, 117, 164, 182–85, 207 resentment, 10–11, 102, 104, 132–34, 155–56, 211, 239–41, 242n1, 243n2 res publica, 164, 182–83, 185 revolution, 159n19, 171, 176, 186, 196, 204, 215–17, 219; French, 103, 170 rights, 8, 27, 80–81, 87, 94, 101, 135, 137, 147–50, 155, 166, 168, 170, 173–74, 178–80, 184, 200, 205, 230; human rights, 37, 147, 237; social rights, 76, 87, 102, 174, 178–79, 195 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 219–21 Rincón-Gille, Nicolás, 161n30, 212, 229–35, 241 Rinesi, Eduardo, 185 Rodin, Auguste, 211, 216, 219–20 Rose, Nikolas, 5, 7 Rossellini, Roberto, 66, 70–72 San José de Apartadó, 146; Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó (Community of Peace of San José de Apartadó), 36–37, 44n17, 146, 163, 229 scene, 17–18, 28–29, 32–39, 46–49, 51, 54, 77, 92–93, 118–19, 121, 128, 146–48, 166, 172, 211, 214–16, 223–24 Scott, James, 32–34, 43n11–12 social movements, 15, 17–18, 41, 55, 134, 158n2, 163, 187, 207n7, 241 sovereign subject, 10, 93, 97 specter, 37, 43n8, 107, 153, 228, 234 stability, 30, 39, 123, 167, 184, 236 state, 7, 15–16, 36–37, 40–42, 44n17, 80–81, 83–90, 94, 96, 98, 101–2, 106, 112n6, 120, 123, 125–26, 132, 146–48, 151, 155–57, 163–64, 168–79, 182, 185–90, 193, 195–97,

200–206, 207n7, 208n12, 230, 240; of things, 11–12, 15, 110–11, 210 subjectivization, 20n9, 33–34, 45, 134–39, 159n19, 190, 199, 208n15; political, 5, 13, 15, 30–31, 33, 35–39, 74, 117, 121, 136–40, 149, 179, 181, 217, 227 Taksim Square, 145, 159n20–21 temporality, 16, 110–11, 153, 156, 164, 176–78, 211, 219, 236, 240 territory, 2, 36–37, 55, 59, 80–81, 95–96, 118, 123, 128, 130, 138–39, 149–57, 160n26, 188, 193, 201, 125, 233; dispossession of, 5, 36, 80–81 testimony, 18, 49, 54–55, 80, 82, 92, 152–54, 160n27, 161n30, 198, 210, 233–34, 241 time, 9, 14, 16, 23–24, 28, 30–34, 39, 51–53, 56, 59, 67, 74, 76, 78n6, 100, 104, 110–11, 139, 146, 153–55, 160, 167, 177, 206–7, 208n11, 210–11, 213, 219–21, 224–27, 232, 236n1, 240 torsion, 15, 27, 32, 38, 43n12, 45–48, 65–66, 71–72, 108, 129, 156, 165, 167–68, 199, 211, 213, 223, 226 Torso in the Belvedere. See Belvedere Torso tradition, 18n2, 31, 42n3, 49, 61, 92, 129, 133, 151, 180, 182–83, 185, 187, 198, 232 trauma, 70, 100, 156, 209, 232 The United States of America, 9, 79, 85, 88, 113n19, 134, 137, 164, 215 unity, 41, 56, 103, 181, 218, 220 universality, 37, 126, 148, 159n14, 191 uprising, 16, 160n23, 186, 189–91, 194, 242 utopia, 43, 56, 59–60, 74, 108, 154 verification, 60, 148, 159n14, 165, 170, 177 victim, 7, 11, 146, 210, 229–30, 233, 237

266

Index

victimization, 88, 137, 139, 156, 229–30 violence, 6, 16, 36–37, 49, 81, 85–86, 106, 109, 123, 130, 132–34, 137, 140–45, 153–54, 158n6, 159nn11–12, 165, 180, 188, 202–6, 208n15, 209–10, 214, 227, 229–35 vulnerability, 9, 68, 82, 151, 156 war, 6, 109, 118, 130–31, 133, 136, 141, 158n7, 189, 191, 193–94, 203, 209, 229 Wayúu Women’s Force, 138–39

wealth, 84, 91–92, 189, 192, 194 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 211, 218–19 The World Bank, 87, 195 the/a wrong, 34, 101, 124, 126–28, 130, 135, 156, 170 xenophobia, 103–4 Zibechi, Raúl, 164, 186 Zivi, Karen, 46 Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 8, 20n14

Author Bio

Laura Quintana is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). She has published several contributions in the areas of contemporary political philosophy and modern and contemporary aesthetics. Her recent research mainly addresses the aesthetic dimension of forms of power and emancipation and their effects on the world, from a transdisciplinary approach based on a dialogue between a philosophy situated in Latin America and contemporary views of anthropology and art. Among her most recent books are Políticas de los cuerpos (2020); Movimientos sociales y subjetivaciones políticas (coedited with A. Fjeld and E. Tassin, 2016); Intervenciones filosóficas en medio del conflicto: debates sobre la construcción de paz en Colombia hoy (coedited with D. Paredes, A. Fjeld, and Carlos Manrique, 2016); and Cómo se forma un sujeto político: prácticas estéticas y acciones colectivas (coedited with Carlos Manrique, 2016).

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