Rancière y La Política Pura

Article EJPT
European Journal of Political Theory

10(3) 303–326
Jacques Rancière and the ! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
problem of pure politics sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1474885111406386
ept.sagepub.com
Samuel A. Chambers
John Hopkins University
Abstract
Over the past decade, Jacques Rancière’s writings have increasingly provoked and
inspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called norma-
tive theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Rancière
offers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwarts
and interrupts what Rancière calls the police order, la police – a term that encapsulates
most of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments,
and courts). Interpreters have been tempted to read Rancière as proffering a formally
pure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utter
opposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancière’s thinking
of politics: for Rancière politics goes on within police orders and for this reason he
strongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could
never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In care-
fully delineating the politique–police relation I show that the terms of Rancière’s political
writings are multiple and multiplied. Rancière consistently undermines any effort to
render politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporary
political theory.
Keywords
democracy, politics, purity, Rancière, theory, the political
Over the last ten years Jacques Rancière’s writings have had a growing impact on
English-speaking contemporary political theory, particularly in the UK and North
America. The English translation of Disagreement prompted a trickle of articles at
the beginning of this decade that turned into a steady stream of special issues,
symposia, and edited volumes that are just now appearing at the end of the
decade.1 Rancière’s rethinking of politics has provoked and inspired those political
theorists who seek an approach to politics that avoids the abstraction of Rawlsian
Corresponding author:
Samuel A. Chambers, The Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science, 278 Mergenthaler,
3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Email: samchambers@jhu.edu
304 European Journal of Political Theory 10(3)
proceduralism and Habermasian deliberative democracy, while refusing to repeat

the philosophical platitudes of certain forms of post-structuralism. The power and
potential of Rancière’s approach to political philosophy lies in his ability and
willingness to treat politics afresh – to come at the question of politics or ‘the
political’ from an as yet unexplored angle. Rancière thereby gives political theorists
new material, new resources for thinking politics, simply because he redefines not
just what politics means, but what it is and what it does.2
Of course, this blade cuts both ways, since Rancière’s new conceptualization of
politics has certain negative consequences as well: first, it means that much of what
political theorists study, and a great deal of what they argue, will turn out –
according to Rancière’s new definition – to be something other than politics,
and, second, as Rancière himself concludes, it means that the ancient project of
political philosophy is not the highest and noblest pursuit that both Socrates and
Strauss made it out to be.3 Quite to the contrary, Rancière declares directly: ‘I am
not a political philosopher’.4 And he has good reasons to make such a statement,
since within the terms of his arguments ‘political philosophy’ has a very particular
meaning. Rancière rejects the idea of taking political philosophy as a branch or
‘natural division’ of the broader field of philosophy.5 Indeed, according to Rancière
the telos of the political philosophy project is the very elimination of politics.6 This
claim holds, according to Rancière, across the canon. From Plato to Aristotle,
from Marx to Arendt, political philosophers have sought to supplant the anarchic
disorder of politics with a hierarchical order of the philosopher.7
As readers of Rancière have duly noted, all of this raises the question of how to
understand the relationship between what Rancière calls politics and what we have
been calling politics for a very long time (and Rancière renames la police).8 Given
the broad-sweeping nature of Rancière’s redefinition of the everyday activities of
politics under the category of ‘police’, it is tempting to read him as something like
an Arendtian.9 That is, in his effort to get at the specificity of politics, Rancière
could appear to be circumscribing a specific sphere for politics while relegating all
other phenomena to the non- or apolitical. Thus, as Arendt gives us the categories
of labour/work/action, Rancière would offer us politics/police. Like Arendt,
Rancière would here be seeking a purer conception of politics; as she protests
against the encroachment of the social onto the realm of action, Rancière would
protest against the expansion of police orders in such a way as to crowd out pol-
itics. At the same time, one might instead be enticed to locate a third term in
Rancière’s thinking – one that would either ground the other two, or transcend
them in dialectical fashion. Rather than an Arendtian pure sphere of politics, we
would thus have either a Kantian version of Rancière (wherein the third term
serves formally as the condition of possibility for politics/police) or a Hegelian
version (in which politics and police stage a confrontation whose synthesis
determines history).
In this article I will first show briefly that some of Rancière’s best interpreters
(and sometimes with encouragement from Rancière’s own texts) have followed one
of these two, tempting readings and either taken Rancière to support a pure theory
Chambers 305
of politics or supplemented his account with a third term that would somehow
mediate the relation between politics and police. However, I will then go on to
argue that Rancière’s potential contribution to political theory lies not in
Arendtian or Hegelian veins of thought. Rancière rejects, perhaps above all else,
the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure,
and Rancière’s critique of the tradition of political philosophy (from Plato and
Aristotle to Marx and yes, Arendt10) centres on his resistance to the purity or
purification of politics. As I will outline very briefly, I frequently bring my reading
of Rancière into sharper relief by contrasting it with those approaches to his work
that would (explicitly or tacitly) fold his arguments into a pure thinking of politics.
But I wish to state clearly, here at the outset, that these hermeneutic conflicts
contain important political stakes. The emphasis on impurity matters a great deal
precisely because, for Rancière, politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists
purification. That is, and as I will explain in this article, politics makes a supplement
possible in the face of a social order that says it has no supplement. Politics makes
visible that which a social order wishes to render invisible, and it does so in such a
way that it does not just ‘add’ to what is already given. Instead, it undermines the
purity of the given. To think politics as ‘impure’ in precisely this sense means, on
the one hand, to reject any model of unalloyed politics (whether it be anarchism or
Hegelianism) and, on the other, to insist that politics can never proceed as if the
other can be fully known and incorporated into the social order. In Rancièrean
language, we are always subject to an ‘excess of words’ that both makes politics
possible and prevents its closure.
I work out the support for these conclusions by reading Rancière against not
only his critics but also some of his apparent supporters. Throughout, I insist on a
subtle and precarious understanding of the relationship, in Rancière’s work,
between la police and la politique. This sort of understanding requires a serious
contextualist engagement with the translation of Rancière’s works into English
(and curiously, also, as I will explain, the translation of his work from English
back into French), yet the delicate issues of translation have an important substan-
tive impact on how we understand Rancière’s thinking of politics. I argue that
la politique and la police do not name separate, sealed spheres that are mutually
exclusive. At the same time, I insist that the relation between them cannot be
mediated, grounded, or sublated by a third term. The terms of Rancière’s political
writings are multiple and multiplied. They can never be reduced to two (same/other)
or even to three (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), since their impurity always resists such
a reduction. Indeed, it is in those dimensions of his thought that consistently thwart
efforts (even by his own readers) to render politics pure that political theorists may
find the best resources for thinking politics anew today.
Politics as policing
Rancière’s most direct writings on politics and political philosophy – written in
French in the early 1990s, but translated much more swiftly into English than his
earlier writings – rapidly grabbed the attention of many political theorists for at
least two reasons. First, Rancière poses to himself and to his readers a question that
is clearly fundamental for most political theorists. In the preface to Disagreement
he frames that question as follows: ‘what can be thought of specifically as poli-
tics’.11 Perhaps more importantly for political theorists, and this is the second and
most powerful way that Rancière gains our interest, Rancière argues that a
response to this question ‘force[s]’ a distinction upon us: we must distinguish pol-
itics ‘from what normally goes by the name of politics and for which I propose to
reserve the term policing’.12 When Rancière refers to ‘what normally goes by the
name of politics’ he means: the actions of assemblies and parliaments, the decisions
of courts, the work of politicians, all the efforts of bureaucrats. Rancière not only
renames all of this under a non-political heading, but also gives it a name that
surely sounds pejorative on first reading – since he calls it policing.13
Rancière immediately clarifies his conception of police by showing that, while it
is related to the idea of uniformed officers riding in patrol cars and walking the
street, it must nevertheless be analytically distinguished from ‘the truncheon blows
of the forces of law and order’.14 Rancière uses ‘police’, ‘policing’, and ‘police
order’ to name any order of hierarchy. And thus he invokes this broader concept
of ‘policing’ to indicate both policy-making – as the term in English, though not in
French, already connotes – as well a wide array of economic and cultural arrange-
ments. In order to stress the broad nature of his concept of la police, Rancière
(uncharacteristically) emphasizes the link between his use of police and Foucault’s
work. Foucault argues: first, to the extent that any police order determines hierar-
chical relationships between human beings, ‘the police includes everything’; second,
to the extent that it sets up a relationship between ‘men and things’ the police order
also constitutes a material order.15
These links make it clear that Rancière calls on the concept of la police to
connote the vertical organization of society,16 the dividing up and distribution of
the various parts that make up the social whole. A police order is not just an
abstract order of powers (of laws or principles), it is ‘an order of bodies that defines
the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that
those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of
the visible and the sayable’.17 In this key passage Rancière elaborates on the con-
cept of the police in terms that will become central to his later writings, since ‘an
order of the visible and the sayable’ glosses Rancière’s vital notion of le partage du
sensible – usually translated as ‘the distribution/partition of the sensible’ but also
connoting both sharing and division.18 Policing is a way of dividing up and making
visible the various parts of the social order.
In ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ Rancière suggests that ‘there are two ways of count-
ing the parts of the community’. The first way of counting he calls police, and he
describes it as follows: it ‘only counts empirical parts – actual groups defined by
differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute
the social body’.19 At this point, the English translation of ‘Ten Theses’ moves on
to Rancière’s next sentence (and the next way of counting). However, in the
Chambers 307
original French, as Maria Muhle has very helpfully pointed out, Rancière con-
tinues: ‘à l’exclusion de tout supple´ment’.20 The police then, is not just a way of
counting the actual groups that make up the social order; it is a manner of counting
that excludes the possibility of any supplement to that order. There can be nothing
more to count; the police must count all.21 By asserting that the police’s way of
counting must preclude from the start any remainder, Rancière shows again that
‘policing’ points to a particular type of partition of the sensible. This passage under
discussion immediately precedes Rancière’s seventh thesis, which reads: ‘the police
is a partition of the sensible whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supple-
ment’.22 The police order distributes bodies without remainder and without exclu-
sion (à l’exclusion de tout supple´ment); there is nothing it does not account for,
nothing left over or external to its process of counting.
Politics as purity
Rancière’s definition of politics is now fairly well-known in contemporary theory; it
is his ‘second way of counting’ the parts in any order. Having taken most of the
everyday occurrences that ordinary language refers to as ‘politics’ and recategorized
them under the heading of the ‘police’, Rancière may then identify politics as the
very disruption of the police order. The police order is hierarchic and implicitly built
upon the assumption of inequality (an inequality based on the very differences that
legitimate the domination of the social order). The logic of politics is based on the
presupposition of equality;23 it challenges, disrupts, and consistently interrupts the
smooth flowing of the police order. Put simply, as Rancière does in his seventh
thesis: ‘politics is specifically opposed to the police’.24 Politics is therefore dissensus:
the disruption of the given order of domination (the police order) by a political
subject that only emerges after the moment of politics, a subject that comes to exist
only through the act of politics. I will return later to a much fuller exploration of
what Rancière might mean by la politique, how it relates to la police, and how one
might understand it in the terms of political theory. But first I want to interrupt that
discussion with the question that Rancière’s initial definition immediately calls for:
having defined politics uniquely, what does one then do with that definition?
One option – one that Rancière’s own texts sometimes invite, and one that surely
has tempted some of his very best readers – is to put that novel definition of politics
to work, to use the definition the way Foucault said knowledge was used, ‘for cut-
ting’.25 That is, one can take Rancière’s new definition of politics and operationalize
it as a weapon of critique. Surely Rancière does this himself when, in the latter half of
Disagreement he shows that neo-liberal consensus models of politics (‘third way’
options in Europe and regular interest-group liberalism in the USA) amount to
nothing more, though surely nothing less, than ‘orders of the police’. This would
make Rancière’s definition of politics a tool of criticism, but it remains unclear how it
could serve more than a negative function. It would invite all those questions posed
to Foucault’s work: ‘what are your normative grounds?’; ‘what positive foundation
for actual politics does this definition provide?’ etc.
A second choice, then – particularly if one finds the ‘normative grounds’ com-
plaints plausible and meaningful – would be to take the unique definition of politics
and work it up into a full-blown alternative theory of politics. Rancière himself
eschews this option, but Todd May has picked it in his recently published book,
The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie`re, the first of what will likely be many
books in English that begin to constitute the ‘secondary literature’ on Rancière.26
To be clear, rather than build a new theory of politics on the basis of Rancière’s
definition, May attempts to use Rancière’s definition of politics as a prime resource
for elaborating the extant theory of anarchism. This leads to at least three signif-
icant implications for my effort here to get a better grip on the meaning of ‘politics’
in Rancière’s work.27
1. For May, politics and police stand in stark and ultimate opposition to one
another. It is not enough, on May’s account, to say that politics disturbs
police orders. Rather, the ultimate (anarchist) goal must be the replacement
of the police order of domination with an anarchist freedom. May sees politics
as seeking the elimination of police orders.28 May therefore reads Rancière
against himself when he writes: ‘distributions are what governments do[, b]ut
they are not what people do’.29 For May, the collective anarchist action of polit-
ical agents must remain separate from la police.
2. This means, however, that unlike Rancière, May will insist upon laying out and
defending the ontological grounds for his anarchist vision. May appropriates
Rancière’s conception of equality for his (May’s, not Rancière’s) normative
grounds. Anarchism, in May’s understanding, is committed to a substantive
form of equality, and while May wishes to use Rancière’s thinking to invigorate
his vision of anarchism, this substantive conception of equality is one that
Rancière would never embrace. For May, equality is a goal and a ground.
For Rancière, equality is a presupposition that can only ever be ‘verified’, but
never actually realized. Hence the striking disparity between May’s defense of
anarchist politics, in which he argues that ‘it is Rancière’s concept of equality
that offers a normative framework’,30 and Rancière’s own assertions that equal-
ity is always ‘a one-off act’, thus ‘equality turns into the opposite once it aspires
to a place in the social’.31
3. May’s commitment to anarchist politics leads him, ultimately, to a vision of
politics as singular, unique, and autochthonous. May therefore reads Rancière
through the logic of Žižek’s ‘supplement’ to Rancière, what Žižek calls ‘ultra-
politics’. Ultra-politics consists of the ‘false radicalization’ of la me´sentete
through the construction of an absolute other, where this absolutization elim-
inates the ground for any real confrontation. The other cannot be met and
therein politics itself becomes pure.32 May writes: ‘A democratic politics is
defined by the actions and the understandings of those who struggle, not by
the effects upon or actions taken by those the police order supports.’33 For May,
politics in the sense given by anarchism becomes a pure force, utterly and
radically distinct from and in complete opposition to any and all police orders.
Chambers 309
In his effort to appropriate Rancière’s thinking in the service of anarchist politics

May winds up defending a vision of pure anarchist politics that would obliterate
each and every police order, once and for all. While these conclusions clearly do
not line up with Rancière’s own arguments, they do call for a reinvestigation of the
status of politics within Rancière’s thinking. What does it mean to say, as Rancière
does, that ‘there is no ‘‘pure’’ politics’?
Here it seems helpful to recall Rancière’s critique of Plato and his deconstructive
(my word) reading of Aristotle. In the context of his reworking of Ancient Greek
thought, Rancière consistently recurs to the theme of an ‘impure’ politics, a politics
that always thwarts the order of the philosopher.34 Politics can never be pure
precisely because politics names a fundamental impurity, an essential impropriety
that renders all essentialism futile. This explains Rancière’s reading of the
Aristotelian logos as primordially tainted. As is well known, Aristotle takes logos
to be the property of man that distinguishes him from the animals, those with mere
phone (voice). We know the difference between man and animal, according to
Aristotle, because of the presence of this sign.35 But Rancière twists this story in
a crucial way, by asking a ‘follow-up question’ of Aristotle: how, through what
hermeneutics, can we interpret this sign? The logos/phone distinction is meant to
ground politics, but it turns out that we can only draw the distinction through
politics. Rancière writes:
The only practical difficulty [with Aristotle’s otherwise ‘limpid demonstration’] is in

knowing which sign is required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that
the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance
rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to
recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of political-
ness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance
coming out of their mouths.36
Politics cannot be determined by the presence of the logos. Politics cannot be given
over purely as that which concerns the logos, since politics stages a more funda-
mental, but always impure, conflict over the interpretation of phone and logos. In
other words, when we encounter a creature that makes sound, only politics can
determine whether we hear in that sound phone (rendering the creature a mere
animal) or logos (granting the creature a part in the political community).
Rancière agrees with Aristotle that the question of language is fundamental to
politics, but Rancière’s foundations are impure – in many senses, they are not
really foundations. In claiming man as ‘a political animal’, Aristotle turns language
into an apolitical predeterminant of politics. Rancière, on the other hand, subjects
the human being to the excess of words, thereby claiming man as ‘a literary
animal’.37 This phrase should not indicate an abiding interest in literature; instead
it describes the human animal as always exposed to that ‘excess of words’ (which
Rancière names ‘literarity’) that Plato – and every other philosopher of order – had
hoped to shield us from.38
But if politics has no ground (in language or elsewhere), then it cannot be self-
grounding either. Rancière explains that ‘politics has no ‘‘proper’’ place nor does it
possess any ‘‘natural’’ subjects’.39 We must say, then, not just that politics is not
pure, but more, that politics is that which renders impure. Rancière formulates the
point in many different ways. Politics is dissensus.40 Politics is a splitting into two.41
Politics is a rupture of the logic of the arkhe.42 Politics is subjectivization in the
form of disidentification.43 And with regard to the relation between politics and
police, Rancière makes a very consistent argument: ‘the opposition between politics
and police goes along with the statement that politics has no ‘‘proper’’ object, that
all its objects are blended with the objects of police.44 Politics cannot be uncoupled
from police; it only appears in this ‘blended’ form. But because politics is not
simply impure itself but that which renders impure, this ‘blended’ form must not
be confused with hybridity or the mere amalgamation of different parts. In blend-
ing politics with the police Rancière refuses to merge the two; he gives us a blending
that is always also an othering.
Thus, while it surely seems simple to conclude that May’s Manichean view of
politics/police cannot hold – politics can never be pure45 – the argument proves
more complicated than such a conclusion would suggest. Impurity is, by definition,
never simple. And the impurity of politics produces a paradox for Rancière’s
thought. On the one hand, politics must not be pure. On the other, politics as
that which disrupts the police order must somehow remain ‘other’ to that order;
this is why the ‘blending’ is never a merging. For the disruptive force of politics to
be preserved, it must somehow remain external to the police order that it would
disrupt. Yet politics as pure ‘externality’ would preclude the necessary ‘meeting of
the heterogeneous’ that enacts politics.46 Hence, politics must be other to police,
but not purely other. The key to responding to this paradox is to refuse to over-
come it. Instead, Rancière’s theory of politics must be understood as thinking the
paradox, as capturing its flavour and mobilizing its force, rather than attempting to
erase or resolve it.47 To defend this sort of paradoxical argument means starting
with a rejection of the idea of pure politics – one that Rancière has repeatedly
asserted and one that I have defended in this section – but it is impossible to rest
here. We must also grasp the relation between politics and police. And while we
need to understand the relation as precisely as possible, we must always also insist
that the relation itself can never be specified with precision. On the topic of this
relation, so central to Rancière’s thought, no English-language commentator on
Rancière has shed more light than Jean-Philippe Deranty.
Politics and the political: the ‘three term’ model

Deranty has written a number of articles (in English) that provide comprehensive
overviews of the political thought of Rancière. Arguing in particular that
Rancière’s work can be best understood within the context of the politics of rec-
ognition, Deranty compares Rancière’s arguments directly to the work of Axel
Honneth. In this context, I am not overly concerned with Deranty’s broader
Chambers 311
arguments;48 instead, I wish to focus on a particular set of claims he makes within

them about how we should understand the relation between politics and police.
I am somewhat surprised that Deranty’s argument on this front has not had a
bigger impact on the English-language literature on Rancière, since Deranty pro-
poses a radical re-evaluation of Rancière’s account of politics – precisely the issue
that animates most political theorists when they turn to Rancière
Deranty mentions at the end of his account (and in a footnote), a set of facts
that I think should be foregrounded. As Deranty explains, Rancière was invited to
participate in a seminar run by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in
February 1982. This was the seminar at which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argued
for the distinction between la politique and le politique.49 Before digging into
Deranty’s specific reading of Rancière it seems prudent to take one step back.
There is a rich and varied tradition in contemporary political theory of insisting
on a difference between ‘politics’ or ‘policy’ (la politique), on the one hand, and
something like ‘the political’ (le politique), on the other. Oliver Marchart provides
perhaps the definitive history of what he calls ‘political difference’ from Ricoeur,
through Arendt, Schmitt, and Mouffe, all the way to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe –
with side-trips into Wolin, Sartori, and others.50 Marchart assigns himself the task of
tracing the distinction between politics/the political through all of 20th-century polit-
ical theory. He sees his work as something of a definitive account and provides
lengthy commentary on most of the ‘big names’ in Continental thought. His refer-
ences to Rancière, therefore, prove important precisely for their sparseness. Early on,
Rancière’s name appears in a list of many who recognize a split between politics/the
political, but there is no direct discussion of any of Rancière’s work.51 Indeed,
Rancière receives no substantive attention until very late in the book. The few
references that do appear prove thin, but nevertheless very significant.
So how does the general understanding of ‘political difference’, which Marchart
practically defines in his opening page as the difference between la politique and
le politique, manifest itself in Rancière? On first mention, Marchart suggests some-
thing striking, but which goes unremarked as such in his own text. He writes: ‘what
Rancière calls la politique . . . others would call the political’ and this would be dis-
tinguished, for Rancière, from politics as police.52 But ‘the political’ is the English
translation of le politique, and thus, according to Marchart, Rancière uses la politique
to refer to ‘the political’ precisely when others would use le politique. In the terms of
Marchart’s own broader work (a book on ‘political difference’) this move makes
sense, since it allows Marchart to show that while not starting with or insisting upon
the distinction politics/the political (and as I would note, while not explicitly or
formally using the term le politique at all) Rancière, in a way, stumbles upon,
what Marchart calls, ‘political difference’. For other thinkers this is the difference
between le politique and la politique, whereas for Rancière it is the difference between
la politique and la police. And I should note that Marchart himself does not dwell on
this point – Rancière is certainly not one of the central thinkers of ‘political differ-
ence’ – and therefore Marchart may well be more alert to the slippery and ‘impure’
thinking of politics in Rancière that I try to track and assert here.
Nevertheless, in terms of my own argument, Marchart’s key quote on Rancière

to the effect that la politique is ‘the political’ for Rancière does seem odd, especially
since the English translators of Rancière’s key texts on politics (the works from the
early 1990s) have seen fit to translate, and do so rather consistently, la politique as
‘politics’ and not as ‘the political’. That is, for those reading Rancière’s work in
English translation, ‘the political’ makes no appearance at all. Thus, I would sug-
gest that it might make more sense to leave Rancière out of the ‘political difference’
model entirely, rather than trying to make him fit into it in inverted fashion. The
fact that Marchart quickly moves on from Rancière may be taken as evidence that
he too sees Rancière as not quite fitting the model.
In any case, things grow stranger still when one turns from Marchart’s brief
comments on Rancière and political difference, to Marchart’s reading of Žižek’s
account of Rancière. In this context, Marchart tells us that Žižek finds his own
version of political difference in Rancière, which Marchart summarizes as ‘the
difference between ‘‘la politique/police’’ and ‘‘le politique’’’.53 This formulation,
especially in light of the earlier one, requires some sorting out. Here again ‘the
political’ is distinguished from police. But whereas in the earlier version we had the
formula la politique ¼ the political, we now have a return to the more standard
le politique ¼ the political. At the same time, this second formulation requires
making la politique a synonym for the police. However, Žižek’s claim54 here strikes
me as quite simply untenable since Rancière’s writings on politics consistently refer,
in French, to a difference between la politique and la police. Žižek asserts that
la politique and la police are the same, for Rancière, when in fact the difference
between them is the fundamental and driving force in all of Rancie`re’s writing on
politics. Indeed, if there is to be any obvious ‘political difference’ in Rancière it
surely is to be found here – in the difference between la politique and la police that
Rancière discusses repeatedly and at such length. Again, one wonders whether the
project of finding politics/the political in Rancière is merely futile.
Perhaps, then, the distinction between politics and ‘the political’ has no obvious
place in Rancière’s work. Indeed, at first glance it would seem that no commenta-
tors on, and no translators of, Rancière have any recourse to a distinction in his
own work in French between la politique and le politique.55 It is more than notable,
then, that Deranty not only locates this difference in Rancière’s argument, but also
makes it central to his reading of Rancière. Deranty structures his articulation of
Rancière’s key concepts by introducing both politics and police in a rather typical
fashion. But in defining ‘politics’ as that which breaks with the order of la police,
Deranty refers explicitly to la politique. Thus, the opposing terms, according to
Deranty, are la police and la politique. This brings Deranty back to the same
dilemma that May faces: how to understand the interaction between these two
terms that are diametrically opposed? Deranty’s answer is striking and original:
This tension between la police and la politique creates a necessary place where they can
and must be mediated. Rancière calls this third term le politique. It is the place where
the underlying equality operating within social inequality is verified pragmatically in
Chambers 313
struggles and demands of equality. In this place is therefore also verified the wrong-
ness and ‘wrungness’ of a social order that is otherwise presented as naturally ordered.
It identifies victims of the tort and those who perpetrate the tort. In simple words,
le politique is always a demand for justice. Le politique is in essence polemic.56
In a subtle yet stark departure from the standard reading, Deranty says there are
not two terms in Rancière’s conceptual frame, there are three. Le politique is the
third term. It identifies and points to that place in which the logic of domination
contained by la police meets the presumption of equality mobilized by la politique.
As Deranty explains in his later note, this reading contends that Rancière has taken
on board, in a serious way, the Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy-inspired distinction
between le politique and la politique. However, and utterly unsurprisingly, Rancière
has mobilized the distinction for distinct, if not opposite, ends. Whereas le politique
for Nancy suggests something like the very essence of ‘the political’, which has been
eroded or lost within modernity, Rancière uses the third term, le politique, so as to
enable an anti-essentialist understanding of politics.57
By introducing what he calls ‘the third term’ in Rancière’s thinking of politics,
Deranty offers a powerful and persuasive argument for how to interpret the rela-
tion between la police and la politique. But we still have to ask whether the reading
is supported by the text; that is, is this difference between la politique and
le politique actually present in Rancière’s writings? If the difference does exist in
French it has by no means been preserved by Rancière’s English translators: nei-
ther Julie Rose, who translated La Me´sentente, nor Rachel Bowlby and Davide
Panagia, who translated the ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, refer to such a distinction;
they make no effort whatsoever to call attention to a difference between le politique
and la politique. Indeed, the texts themselves include very sparse references to
le politique and make no mention of any explicit or meaningful distinction to be
drawn between la politique and le politique: for example, all of the theses in the ‘10
Theses’ use the French la politique and never le politique. All of this evidence leads
to one central question: where, if anywhere, do we find the distinction in Rancière
between la politique/le politique?
In the case of Žižek (and to a certain extent, Marchart) we can safely say that the
distinction is imposed upon Rancière’s writings from outside in an attempt to make
his thought fit into a set of pre-made categories. But the answer in Deranty’s case
cannot be that simple, since Deranty does not start with ‘political difference’ and
then fit Rancière to this mould; instead, his argument for the ‘three terms’ emerges
directly from his own reading of Rancière. But if a strong distinction between
la politique and le politique cannot be found in either La Me´sentente or ‘Dix
thèses sur la politique’, then where did Deranty find it?
In repeatedly asking this question of myself I had begun to wonder, against my
better judgment, if he made it up. But, of course, he did not. The answer is that
Deranty very likely found the distinction (although he does not tell his readers this)
in Rancière’s works that were originally written in English. To repeat for clarity’s
sake: the distinction that Deranty draws between la politique and le politique
originates not in Rancière’s better-known writings on politics but from one or two
lectures58 that Rancière presented in English. In 1991 Rancière gave the paper
‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’ at a conference in the United States.
The conference, as Rancière tells readers in the preface to the second French edi-
tion of Aux bords du politique, was devoted to ‘the American debate over the
question of identity’, and circled around issues of nationalism and racism.59 The
conference organizers posed specific questions to the paper-givers, and Rancière
chose to structure his talk directly in response to one of those. In just his second
paragraph, after clearing the ground concerning his having to give the lecture in
English, a language that is not his own, Rancière writes: ‘I quote from the third
point of the list of issues we were asked to address: ‘‘What is the political?’’’60 Thus,
the very idea of thinking about ‘the political’ comes to Rancière from outside, from
what was at the time a very American-centric debate over multiculturalism, and it
is voiced in a foreign language, English. Rancière then goes on give his answer to
the question ‘what is the political’, an answer that corresponds perfectly well with
Deranty’s commentary. ‘The political is the encounter between two heterogeneous
processes’. The first process Rancière calls ‘policy’; the second is ‘equality’.61 As
Deranty will echo more than a decade later, Rancière says ‘we have 3 terms’, but at
this point those terms are ‘policy, emancipation, and the political’.62 Rancière then
suggests we name the process of emancipation ‘politics’. Finally, if we translate
‘policy’ back into French as police,63 we wind up with the three terms that Deranty
argues for: la police, la politique, and le politique. La politique is that logic of
equality that encounters the order of domination constituted by la police; le poli-
tique is the ground or space of such an encounter.
Nonetheless, the logic here clearly looks less than straightforward, and thus I
remain skeptical that the ‘three terms’ approach of both Deranty and the lecturer-
in-English, Rancière, captures adequately the thinking of politics that Rancière’s
original French texts provide. Before complicating matters with the help of just
those texts, I should bring the story of ‘political difference in Rancière’ to some sort
of close. First, Rancière does mention the difference between politics and the polit-
ical in other places. In another lecture also given in English, in 2003, Rancière
refers directly to the previous talk: ‘in an earlier text, I proposed to give the name of
‘‘the political’’ to the field of encounter – and ‘‘confusion’’ – between the process of
politics and the process of police’.64 Yet this lecture does not work with the politics/
political distinction and certainly does not maintain a ‘three terms’ model; rather,
it invokes this earlier work in order to make the point, which I have already
discussed, that politics ‘has no ‘‘proper’’ object’.65
I would hypothesize that the idea of three terms in Rancière was probably
instantiated not by these two lectures given in English (one a minor work in
Rancière’s corpus and one still unpublished), but by Rancière’s decision to have
the earlier lecture translated into French and included in the second French edition
of Aux bords du politique. The 1991 lecture was translated into French so as to
make the distinction between la politique and le politique perfectly clear; indeed, in
that edition the editor chose to italicize the le and la that precede politique in order
Chambers 315
to emphasize the ‘political difference’. More than this, the new structure for this
second edition of the very popular book (the first edition included Rancière’s ear-
liest writings centered most directly on politics, the ones upon which La Me´sentente
directly built) placed the 1991 lecture at the centre of a new ‘part one’. Part one was
titled ‘Du politique à la politique’, from the political to politics. Finally, Rancière
wrote a new preface for the second edition in which he explicitly discusses, for the
first (and to my knowledge, only) time in French, the difference between la politique
and le politique. If all that were not enough to make it seem as if this distinction had
always been central to Rancière’s thinking concerning politics, the blurb on the
back of the book excerpts the new preface at just the place where it specifies the
distinction between le politique and la politique. The blurb reads:
If le politique imposes itself as an object of philosophical thought, it is without doubt

that this neutral adjective conveniently signifies a variation with the substance of
la politique, in its ordinary sense of a fight of the parties over power and the exercise
of that power. To speak of le politique and not la politique indicates the principles of
law, power, and community and not the activities of government.66
It seems quite likely, then, that a reader picking up Rancière’s work in French at
some point over the past decade would come away with the impression that the
difference between la politique and le politique had an important role to play in his
thinking of politics. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the vast majority of
Rancière’s writing on politics maintain no such distinction. And it seems crucial
to note here that Rancière’s most important works on politics from the 1990s were
all produced after the 1991 lecture that had suggested ‘three terms’ (in English), yet
Rancière did not bother to fold that terminology into La Me´sentente – clearly the
central text of Rancière’s devoted to politics and engaged with the tradition of
political philosophy. I therefore contend that there is something very problematic
about making the three terms of politics fundamental to one’s interpretation of
Rancière. To do so would be to take the French translation of one short lecture
coupled with an eight-page preface to a second edition of a collection of essays, and
use those texts as some sort of central hermeneutic guidebook allowing one to
reinterpret all of Rancière’s broad corpus on politics. Without any further
reason to think, or evidence to support the idea, that le politique mediates
la politique and la police in Rancière’s main texts, it seems a mistake to structure
an argument about Rancière’s conception of politics around this approach (not to
mention that there seems no evidence that Rancière himself wishes to reinterpret
his past works through this lens; since the 1998 preface, there have been no more
writings to my knowledge that maintain a difference between la politique and
le politique).67
I must stress, however, that my resistance to the idea that le politique provides a
ground or space of encounter between la police and la politique does not rest only a
contextualist argument concerning the production and presentation of these texts.
While I contend that the contextualist work provides reasons to be wary, I also
argue that the insertion of the third term into Rancière’s writings fails to account
for the subtlety and power of his thinking of politics. It actually blunts the inci-
siveness of his conception of la politique to conceive of it within the three-term
model. To make le politique into the space where the ‘fight of politics’ is played out,
returns Rancière far too close to an Arendtian model. Rancière always resists the
idea of a ‘sphere of action’, and the promotion of le politique to a mediating,
grounding term runs the risk of transforming Rancière’s conception of politics
into a specific sort of act that must occur in its ‘proper’ space.68 Indeed, even in
its formal logical structure, the ‘three terms’ approach proves overly symmetrical
and balanced for a thinker who consistently insists on a lack of balance – who
thinks in and through paradox, not symmetry. The three terms model creates a set
of proper spheres for Rancière’s concepts, when those concepts are always designed
to thwart the idea of proper spheres.69
The doubling of politics: democratic politics within the

police order
To prevent closing down Rancière’s thinking of politics by assimilating it to such a
model, I will build directly on Deranty’s arguments, but I want to twist or ‘wring’
them in a particular way. As Deranty stresses, the ‘wrongness’ that politics asserts
in the face of a police order is also a ‘wrungness’ – a twisting or torsion of the police
order and its logic of inequality. In other words, I am trying to apply to Deranty’s
own reading the anti-ontological torsion that Deranty so helpfully identifies in
Rancière’s work. Thus I contend that there are not really three distinct terms in
Rancière’s argument. If there were three terms, then all three of them could be
pure: a realm of domination (police), a realm of dissensus (politics), and a ground
upon which they meet (the political). But this would be to found an essential
conception of politics, le politique, as an ontological ground. This, as Deranty
stresses and as I have been arguing throughout this article, could not be fur-
ther from Rancière’s project. As Rancière consistently underlines, he avoids all
ontology.70 Hence my argument: we do not have three terms (police, politics, the
political) but merely a doubling of one of the two terms.71
Politics is doubled, always and already. It is ‘doubled’ in that it is never singular
and never pure – ‘always and already’ because the doubling is not a secondary
process that happens to a pre-given politics, but an essential feature of la politique
in the first place. Politics, like the logos, is subject to an ‘original taint’ – split from
itself, split into two from the beginning, as Rancière says politics must be.72 Thus,
politics cannot be pure in Rancière’s thought, nor can there be a clear ‘political
difference’ in his work (la politique/le politique) since in his very writings, politics
doubles itself; that is, we cannot distinguish le politique from la politique, since
neither is singular.73 This argument operates on two distinct, yet inextricably
linked levels.
First, I make the case for a ‘doubled politics’ as a solution of sorts to the
dilemma of how to translate – which is nothing other than the question of how
Chambers 317
to read – Rancière: if la politique is never simply itself (never pure, never one) then
we can understand how it is both the disruptive other to the police order and
somehow simultaneously a part of the police order. La politique is always ultimately
opposed to and transformative of la police, but since the former is never simply
itself, it cannot be taken to be wholly external to and outside of the latter. In
grasping for a third term, le politique, Deranty actually goes some distance
toward bringing this dimension of doubling into play in Rancière’s work, but I
insist on the crucial importance of the doubling of la politique, rather than the
preservation of its purity through the introduction of a third term.
However, and secondly, this argument cannot be confined to the level of her-
meneutic debates or semantics (even if it arises there, even if that is the location
from which we can begin to make the argument in the first place). The notion of a
doubled politics not only solves interpretive problems but also casts a great deal of
light on Rancière’s conception of politics – on, as I said in the opening, not just
what it means but what it does. Rancière does not, à la Nancy and others, wish to
separate something like ‘the political’ from politics; nor does he seek to establish
‘the political’ as more originary, more fundamental to politics. For these reasons
Deranty is too quick to assume that le politique is the ‘necessary place’ for politics
and police to meet. Such a rendering of Rancière’s work does not convey clearly
enough what Deranty refers to in the very next paragraph as the ‘anti-ontological’
shape of his argument.74 Perhaps, as Deranty suggests, the difference between
le politique and la politique must be attended to, but the difference cannot be
dichotomized.75 Indeed, the potential ambiguity of ‘politics’ in Rancière’s
English-translation texts helps to convey something of the impurity of politics
that Rancière himself insists upon (interestingly, in English).76 If there can be
said to be such a thing as ‘political difference’ in Rancière, then it is surely this
doubling of politics itself, rendering it always already impure.77
The three-term model tends, as I have shown, to purify politics. In addition, that
approach also seems to ignore quite blatantly a crucial point that Rancière himself
repeatedly makes: politics and police meet within the police order itself. Politics goes
on in the only place where it can go on: within the social formation where it occurs,
i.e. within the space of the police order. And politics must be doubled precisely
because of this fact about its location, because politics is that which opposes the
terms of the police order but does so within its terms. Only an impure form of
politics could do such a thing. ‘There is no ‘‘pure’’ politics.’78 This means that in
trying to grasp the meaning and importance of Rancière’s conception of politics as
that which irrupts into any given police order, we must see the interconnected
nature of the two. In a crucial passage that responds to critics who would (mis)read
him as proposing the purity of politics, Rancière writes (and I comment in brack-
ets): ‘politics does not stem from a place outside of the police. There is no place
outside of the police. [And hence there need not be a third place where politics and
police meet – all ‘‘meeting’’ is conflict within the police order itself.] But there are
conflicting ways of doing [sic] with the ‘‘places’’ that it allocates: of relocating,
reshaping, or redoubling them.’79 I italicize Rancière’s use of ‘redoubling’ since
the word itself is a doubling of double, connecting directly to my broader argument

about how to understand his conception of politics. To remain both impure and
non-dialectical (politics’ impurities cannot merely be waiting to be removed
through a process of sublation), politics must always be ‘redoubled’ in this way.80
Reading la politique as doubled while arguing for a doubling of politics in dem-
ocratic politics, brings to light both the impurity of politics and the inherent oppo-
sition between politics and police. Thus, if le politique plays a role in Rancière’s
theory, it cannot be a grounding role, that of providing a space for politics.
Rancière refutes this idea directly: ‘As for the exceptionality of politics, it has no
specific place. Politics ‘‘takes place’’ in the space of the police [again, no third space
is needed], by rephrasing and restaging social issues, police problems and so on.’81
The encounter between la politique and la police is never definitive, never final, and
never produces a new ‘stage’ of history. It is always a renegotiation of the very
police order in which we live.82
And in the end, democratic politics can do nothing else than this: renegotiate the
police order. Those readers of Rancière who see in (or project into) his works a
radical alternative to every form of politics as we know and have known it, will find
this conclusion utterly unsatisfying. May and others want Rancière to provide what
a certain form of orthodox Marxism once offered: a utopianism stripped of the
label ‘utopian’, a vision for a politics wholly other to what lies before us in our own
political conjuncture. In a word, hope. But a particular kind of hope: a pure hope,
untainted by the unruliness of democracy. And yet, nothing could be further from
Rancière’s own vision of democracy: for him, unruliness is precisely what democ-
racy offers. But that is not all it offers, for in the unruliness of democracy we can
locate the verification of equality through the excess of words,83 and the only
genuine hope there is: not the hope that politics will save us, but that democratic
politics will change what is, will alter what is given.
For this reason, what we might call, even in the face of his own reluctance to
give it such a name, ‘Rancière’s political theory’, must be a particular kind of
political theory.84 Not despite, but due to the nature of its radical commitments
to equality and the people, this is not a full-blown ‘theory of politics’ or the polit-
ical. Rancière has very recently written (speaking of his own work in the third
person): ‘he never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature,
cinema or anything else. He thinks that there is already a good deal of them and he
loves trees enough to avoid destroying them to add one more theory to all those
available on the market.’85 These statements make it obvious that Rancière’s think-
ing of politics resists the trajectory of an anarchist project, or any other pure,
formal account of what politics should be or become. But this is not just because
Rancière has chosen to do something else other than ‘produce a theory of politics’.
It is because democratic politics is never a pure politics.86 To insist that politics is
not pure is surely to reject the idea of a formal political theory that would lay
normative grounds or predict historical processes. As Rancière puts it, ‘I am not
saying this is how all of us must think and act.’87 But it is by no means to reject
‘political theory’ in a more broadly conceived form, since a commitment to the
Chambers 319
impurity of politics is a commitment to another task, a reraising of the question

‘How are we to reinvent politics?’88
A Rancièrean reinvention of politics would have to start with the hierarchy,
inequality, and structural domination of all social orders (la police). Deranty argues
that ‘Rancière has borrowed the metaphor of society as a gravitational order, a
kind of Aristotelian nature, where objects always end up falling to their proper
places’.89 I would stress, however, that while Rancière mentions such a metaphor
he always identifies it as a metaphor. Those committed to the hierarchy of the police
order may wish to literalize this metaphor, to naturalize the inequality of a given
police order. But, in a supplement to Rancière’s arguments about the ‘presuppo-
sition of equality’, we can argue that police orders are built upon an assumption of
inequality. Those ‘stultifiers’ whose existence depends upon that presumption will
try to ‘verify’ it repeatedly by demonstrating their own superior intelligences, and
their own repeated presuppositions of inequality mean that the social order is
always in fact marked by domination.
But this is not to say that there is anything at all natural about the domination
of the social order. And the verification of the equality of intelligences will always
expose the wrong of the police order. There is nothing natural about inequality; it is
nothing like gravity, despite the metaphor. As Rancière himself says in The
Ignorant Schoolmaster: ‘convention alone can reign in the social order’.90 Thus,
to call the social order a ‘quasi-natural order’, as Deranty does, requires us to put
enormous weight and repeated emphasis on the quasi- part: the social order passes
itself off as natural; it has recourse to the metaphor of gravity. But natural it is not.
A reinvented, impure politics would remain committed to the verification of the
principle of equality – a principle that can only be verified, never made substantial –
in the face of continued domination of the police order in which we do, and
must, live.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was given at the American Political Science annual meeting
in Toronto, in Sept. 2009; I am deeply indebted to my fellow panelists and audience mem-
bers for their insights and suggestions, especially Lisa Disch, Davide Panagia, Mike Shapiro,
and John Zumbrunnen. For earlier engagements with Rancière’s thought on the police, I am
grateful to the graduate students in my 2009 seminars and to Andrew Schaap. I am pleased
to note my great appreciation for the efforts of two anonymous reviewers for EJPT for their
very helpful comments and suggestions. For help with translations, I owe another debt to
Rebecca Brown. Finally, for her careful and inspiring reading of an earlier draft, I give my
sincere thanks to Jane Bennett.
1. Jacques Rancière (1999) [1995] Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press. In this article I cite a large number of the early texts
on Rancière; nonetheless there are a few that I do not address directly that are certainly
important contributions. They include: Michael Dillon (2003) ‘(De)void of Politics? A
Response to Jacques Rancière’s ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics’’’, Theory and Event 6(4); Kirstie
McClure (2003) ‘Disconnections, connections, and questions: Reflections on Jacques

Rancière’s ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics’’’, Theory and Event 6(4); Aamir Mufti (2003)
‘Reading Jacques Rancière’s ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics’’: After September 11th’, Theory
and Event 6(4); Paolo Palladino and Tiago Moreira (2006) ‘On Silence and the
Constitution of the Political Community’, Theory and Event 9(2). I also address some
of the more recent literature, but much of it has only just appeared or remains in press.
Here I would wish to emphasize two recent special issues in Parallax (15(3), 2009) and
Borderlands (8(2), 2009) and two forthcoming volumes: Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.)
(2010) Jacques Rancie`re: Key Concepts. London: Acumen. Paul Bowman and Richard
Stamp (eds) (2010) Reading Rancie`re. London: Continuum.
2. I put the point this way because for Rancière the question of politics is not a question of
definition or even of ontology, but always a question of interruptions, interventions or
effects. Politics is not; politics disrupts.
3. Leo Strauss (1959) What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies. Glencoe, IL: Free
Press.
4. Jacques Rancière (2003) ‘Comment and Responses’, Theory and Event 6(4): para. 10.
5. Rancière (n. 1), pp. ix, 61.
6. This is the first of many places where my reading of Rancière might be seen to intersect
with the thought of Alain Badiou. In this case, Badiou and Rancière share a harsh
condemnation of ‘political philosophy’. For Rancière this judgement reflects a funda-
mental conflict between philosophy and politics (and Rancière sides with politics in this
dispute) whereas for Badiou the problem of ‘political philosophy’ consists in a misun-
derstanding of the proper role of philosophy in relation to politics. Alain Badiou (2005)
Metapolitics, tr. Jason Barker, p. 118. London: Verso. In discussing so-called ‘political
difference’ in the text, one could also broach an analysis of the shared but distinct
special status that Rancière and Badiou both give to la politique. On this point, see
Marchart’s very helpful chapter on Badiou, specifically the argument concerning
Badiou and Rancière’s shared ‘reversal’ of the privileging of ‘the political’ over ‘politics’
within Marchart’s broader exploration of political difference. Oliver Marchart (2007)
Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and
Laclau, pp. 119–20. Edinburgh University Press. In general, further exploration of the
similarities, and radical differences, between Badiou and Rancière would take me too
far afield within this article, but I would suggest that Marchart’s analysis combined with
the exegesis I offer here (along, of course, with Badiou’s own chapters on Rancière in
Metapolitics) might help set the stage for future work on Rancière and Badiou. See also
Nina Power (2009) ‘Which Equality? Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig
Feuerbach’, Parallax 15(3): 63–80.
7. Jacques Rancière (1974) La leçon d’Althusser. Paris: Gallimard. Jacques Rancière
(2008) ‘Misadventures in Critical Thinking’, unpublished manuscript.
8. Alex Thomson (2003) ‘Re-Placing the Opposition: Rancière and Derrida’, paper given
at ‘Fidelity to the Disagreement’, Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Jeremy
Valentine (2005) ‘Rancière and Contemporary Political Problems’, Paragraph 28(1):
46–60.
9. Hannah Arendt (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press. Andrew Schaap (2010) ‘The Rights of Political Animals: Jacques
Rancière’s Critique of Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory 9(4): 22–45.
10. On this point Rancière is emphatic: ‘I wrote the ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics’’ primarily as a
critique of the Arendtian idea of a specific political sphere and a political way of life’.
Chambers 321
Jacques Rancière (2003) ‘The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and aesthetics’, p. 2,

presented at ‘Fidelity to the Disagreement’, Goldsmiths College, University of
London, London.
11. Rancière (n. 1), p. xiii; emphasis added.
12. Ibid.; emphasis in original.
13. Early commentary on Rancière’s thinking with regard to politics has been so caught up
in his distinctive definition of politics as to lead to relative neglect of his concept of
la police.
14. Ibid. p. 28.
15. Michel Foucault (1979) ‘Omnes et Singulatum’, The Tanner Lectures on Human
Values, Stanford, CA.
16. I call this a vertical organization to express Rancière’s insistence on thinking social
order as an order of hierarchy and domination. See Jane Bennett (2010) Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. One
might wonder whether ‘police order’ describes any social order, whether the term is
broad enough to include spontaneous and horizontal ordering. Rancière simply does
not address these issues; for him, the social order is always structured hierarchically.
But we might go on to say, within Rancièrean terms, that the horizontal dimensions of a
social order are produced by politics.
17. Rancière (n. 1), p. 29; emphasis added.
18. For an argument that shows how partage can (and must) be both sharing and division,
see Davide Panagia (2010) ‘Partage du sensible’, in Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.), Jacques
Rancie`re: Key Concepts. London: Acumen.
19. Jacques Rancière (2001) ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory and Event 5(3): para. 19.
20. Jacques Rancière (1998) Aux bords du politique., p. 176. Paris: La Fabrique; all trans-
lations from this edition are mine. Cf. Maria Muhle (2007) ‘Politics, Police and Power
between Foucault and Rancière’, unpublished manuscript, p. 4.
21. I agree completely with Muhle (n. 20), when she goes on to suggest that the phrase left
out of the English translation is actually the ‘central piece’ of Rancière’s argument,
precisely because ‘what politics does, is to make this supplement possible’, p. 4.
22. Rancière (n. 19), para. 19.
23. The phrase ‘presupposition of equality’ may sound like it needs a qualifier: social
equality, bodily equality, existential equality? But as I will explain, for Rancière equality
is never substantive, and it is for just this reason that it cannot have a qualifier.
25. Michel Foucault (1984) The Foucault Reader, p. 88. New York: Pantheon Books.
26. Todd May (2008) The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie`re: Creating Equality.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
27. The three points condense and summarize certain elements of a much longer engage-
ment of mine with May’s book. Samuel A. Chambers (2010) ‘The Politics of the Police:
From Neoliberalism, to Anarchism, and Back to Democracy’, in Bowman and Stamp
(n. 1).
28. May (n. 26), p. 43, argues that ‘in the end, the goal of policing is precisely that of
eliminating politics’. This is either a misreading of Rancière or a significant departure
from his argument, since Rancière simply never says such a thing about police orders or
policing (though he does say it about political philosophy, which is precisely the project
of eliminating politics in favour of only policing). For the context of May’s anarchism,
see Todd May (1994) The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. See also Colin Ward (1982)
Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom Press.
29. May (n. 26), p. 47; emphasis added.
30. Ibid. p. 128.
31. Rancière (n. 1), p. 34.
32. Slavoj Žižek (2005) ‘The Lesson of Rancière’, in Gabriel Rockhill (ed.), The Politics of
Aesthetics, p. 71. New York: Continuum. Žižek seems to be offering a very subtle and
wholly unelaborated critique of Rancière in this afterword that otherwise remains full
of praise. Early in the essay Žižek provides his ‘supplement’ in the form of an ultra-
politics that clearly depends upon making politics so pure as to be meaningless, and
then, later in the essay, Žižek somewhat casually refers to Rancière as one of the ‘post-
Althusserian partisans of ‘‘pure politics’’’ (p. 75). As I will show, Rancière flatly and
forceful denies the very idea of a pure politics. And Rancière has recently deflected
Žižek’s implicit critique by denying the use of the concept ‘post-politics’, which Žižek
wrongly attributes to him. Jacques Rancière (2009) ‘A Few Remarks on the Method of
Jacques Rancière’, Parallax 15(3): 114–23, p. 116. For a reading that follows Žižek’s
‘post-politics line’ and that offers a strong critique of Rancière’s privileging of demo-
cratic politics, see Jodi Dean (2009) ‘Politics without Politics’, Parallax 15(3): 20–36.
For a powerful reading of Žižek on Rancière, see Valentine (n. 8).
33. May (n. 26), p. 72; emphasis added.
34. Jacques Rancière (2004) The Philosopher and his Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
35. Aristotle (1958) Politics, tr. Ernest Barker, p. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
36. Rancière (n. 19), para. 21; cf. Rancière (n. 1), p. 2.
37. Samuel Chambers (2005) ‘The Politics of Literarity’, Theory and Event 8(3): 18–43.
Davide Panagia (2006) The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press. Mark Robson (2005) ‘Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Communities’,
Paragraph 28(1): 77–95. Mark Robson (2009) ‘‘‘A Literary Animal’’: Rancière,
Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy’, Parallax 15(3): 88–101.
38. Jacques Rancière (2000) ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’,
Diacritics 30(2): 113–26, p. 115. Cf. Rancière (n. 1), p. 37.
40. Ibid. para. 24. Cf. Jacques Rancière (n. 10).
41. Jacques Rancière (2006) Hatred of Democracy, p. 61. London: Verso.
43. Rancière (n. 1), p. 37. Jacques Rancière (2007) ‘What does it Mean to be Un’,
Continuum 21(4): 559–69, pp. 559–60. Jacques Rancière (1995) [1991] ‘Politics,
Identification, Subjectivization’, in John Rajchman (ed.)The Identity in Question,
pp. 63–70. New York: Routledge.
44. Rancière (n. 10), p. 4; emphasis added.
45. Of course, we can already find a solid body of secondary literature that makes this case
convincingly. In addition to Muhle (n. 20) and Panagia (n. 37), see Gabriel Rockhill (2004)
‘The Silent Revolution’, Substance 33(1): 54–76. As I noted early on, May’s book is the first
full-length monograph in English specifically devoted to Rancière as a political thinker. His
work makes a wonderful contribution both for its specific readings and arguments and, in
general, for starting to build a secondary literature, which has remained quite sparse up to
now. For just these reasons, however, I find it rather startling that May himself pays no
attention whatsoever to the political theory literature, in English, that already exists on
Chambers 323
Rancière. Deranty’s work, in particular, provides crucial insights to Rancière’s broader

project, and Deranty published more than five years ago in two of the top political theory
journals. In addition, Theory and Event published not only individual articles on Rancière,
but also two separate symposia on his work, both of which were available more than five
years before the appearance of May’s book. I note this lack of attention to any secondary
literature not for the sake of picking nits, but because May’s rich text might have been so
much richer had it worked with, built from and spoken to some of these earlier, important
texts.
46. Rancière (n. 1), p. 32.
47. Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) ‘Rancière and Contemporary Political Ontology’, Theory
and Event 6(4). Deranty points out that Rancière’s entire project in political philosophy
has a paradoxical quality to it, in that Rancière claims that ‘political philosophy is a
logical impossibility’ (para. 2).
48. Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) ‘Jacques Rancière’s Contribution to the Ethics of
Recognition’, Political Theory 31(1): 136–56. Though it should be noted that the ren-
dering Deranty gives of Rancière’s arguments might be traced back to his effort to link
Rancière up with the tradition of the politics of recognition. Surely Hegel is the most
prominent theorist in both that tradition and in the tradition of dialectical thought
(and, anecdotally, Hegel is the other author upon whom Deranty has focused most of
his work). Moreover, although Deranty would never reduce Rancière’s thought to the
dialectic, he still sees Rancière’s conception of politics within the terms of the dialectic.
He refers, for example, to ‘the dialectic between equality and inequality’ that is
punctuated by Rancièrean politics (p. 153).
49. Deranty (n. 47), n. 27. For non-native French speakers such as myself, I would interrupt
here to cover the basics: this ‘distinction’, in French, is first of all nothing more than the
difference between feminine and masculine – and thus becomes no difference at all when
translated into the ‘genderless’ English language. In regular French usage, la politique
connotes more of the everyday business of politics (e.g. ‘department politics’ as used in
English) while le politique suggests something broader, more systematic, more
philosophical.
50. Marchart (n. 6).
51. Ibid. p. 7.
52. Ibid. p. 120.
53. Ibid. p. 145.
54. And it does seem to be Žižek’s claim – and not a misreading by Marchart – as Žižek
opens his reading of Rancière in The Ticklish Subject by referring to la politique/police
as a singular entity that would be ‘perturbed’ by a ‘political mode of rebellion’. Slavoj
Žižek (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p. 172.
London: Verso.
55. In his translator’s introduction Gabriel Rockhill does make reference, if only in passing,
to a distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, but he gives no French translation
of those terms in his English introduction and his translation of the French marks no
distinction either: Jacques Rancière (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics. London:
Continuum. I return to this point in the text.
56. Deranty (n. 47), para. 6, italics original, underlining mine.
57. Ibid. n. 27.
58. Or, the French translations thereof.
59. Rancière (n. 20), p. 13.
60. Rancière (1995, in n. 43), p. 63. The French translation entirely leaves out these first two
paragraphs, and begins instead with Rancière simply asking, of himself and the reader,
‘Qu’est-ce que le politique, nous est-il demande?’ (Rancière, n. 20, p. 83).
61. Rancière (1995, in n. 43), p. 63.
62. Ibid. p. 64. Cf. Deranty (n. 47), para. 6.
63. It seems plausible to make this move, but technically it is surely a mistranslation, since
any English to French dictionary will give la politique as the translation for policy. Here
we see even more starkly that in this lecture Rancière proposes differences that really
only hold in English. A direct translation back into French of the English Rancière uses
would give us the ‘difference’ between la politique and la politique.
64. Rancière (n. 10), p. 4.
65. Ibid.
66. Rancière (n. 20), p. 10. Even here, where Rancière explicitly clarifies what might be at
stake for him in the difference between la politique and le politique we still see nothing
like the stark ‘political difference’ (as Marchart finds in so many other authors) nor a
clear delineation of ‘three terms’ as suggested in Deranty’s work.
67. My goal here is not to provide some sort of definitive refutation of Deranty. Indeed,
Deranty is not necessarily ‘wrong’ in his approach to Rancière, but I worry that his
presentation of the three terms in Rancière can have a somewhat distorting effect, parti-
cularly for those readers who do not have easy access to Rancière’s writings in French.
68. Rancière (n. 19), para. 4; Cf. Rancière (n. 10), p. 3.
69. Another way of grasping the logic here would be to emphasize the terms of dialectics.
Numerous commentators on Rancière have either addressed the issue of ‘dialectical
thinking’ in Rancière directly (Thomson (n. 8); cf. Chambers (n. 27)), applied dialectics
to Rancière (Žižek (n. 32)), or offered a putatively Rancièrean understanding of politics
that obeyed its own dialectical logic (May (n. 26)). For the purposes of my specific
argument here, the question of ‘dialectics’ is not the essential one, since what matters,
ultimately, is whether or not politics can be rendered pure, or if politics is that which
always renders itself (through its doubling) and its other, impure. A dialectical over-
coming produces a purified result, so in that sense a dialectical approach to Rancière
would arrive at the same problematic end point (telos) of a purified politics. For the
sake of clarity my argument here largely avoids the language of dialectics.
70. Rancière (n. 10). Bram Ieven (2009) ‘Heteroreductives: Rancière’s disagreement with
ontology’, Parallax 15(3): 50–62. Rancière elaborates on this point in his recent essay,
written in the third person, ‘A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière’. He
explains: ‘Most of those who conceptualize politics today do it on the basis of a general
theory of the subject, if not on the basis of a general ontology. But Ranciére argues that
he cannot make any deduction from a theory of being as being to the understanding of
politics, art or literature. The reason, he says, is that he knows nothing about what
being as being may be. That’s why he had to manage with his own resources which are
not that much. Since he cannot deduce politics from any ontological principle, he chose
to investigate it out of its limits, he means out of the situations in which its birth or its
disappearance are staged’ (Rancière (n. 32), p. 117).
71. In the recent essay on method, Rancière (n. 32) refers to ‘a doubling up of the notion of
politics’ (p. 121). And it seems more than anecdotal to point out that this essay,
specifically devoted to method and dealing at length with the question of political
theory, makes no mention whatsoever of a difference between politics and the political
(nor one between la politique and le politique).
Chambers 325
72. Rancière (n. 41), p. 61.

73. This doubling may disappear in English translations if and when they lose a sense of
any subtle differences between la politique and le politique – when the act of translation
turns these two terms into the oneness of the English ‘politics’. But it would be just as
wrong for English translators to construct a third term – i.e. ‘the political’ – and insist
on its appearance whenever Rancière writes le politique. This reading is further sup-
ported by the fact that Rancière’s own references to a distinction only emerge in
English. Rancière himself thereby suggests a doubling of la politique much more than
he points to a creation of three terms, à la Deranty.
74. Deranty (n. 47), para. 7.
75. For this reason, there would be no reason to go back and retranslate Rancière’s writings
on politics from the mid-1990s, rewriting them in Bloomian fashion with a literal ‘pol-
itics’ for every appearance of la politique and ‘the political’ for le politique (and the fact
that Deranty refers to la politique as ‘the political’ would undoubtedly trouble such a
project). Rancière himself made little or nothing of that difference at the time of writing
those texts. But even if he might make something of it now, English translators would
still be right, in a certain sense, not to substitute for Rancière’s French a coherent
system of three English terms (police, politics, the political). Current English transla-
tions of both Disagreement and the ‘Ten Theses’ fail to mark for the English reader any
potential distinctions between le politique and la politique, but this is not a failure to be
fixed. Even Davide Panagia, who otherwise reads Rancière more subtly and deftly than
anyone, pays no heed to the difference between la politique and le politique in his
retranslation of ‘The Ten Theses’. Davide Panagia (2001) ‘Ceci n’est pas un argument:
An Introduction to the Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory and Event 5(3). Perhaps it would
make sense to leave la politique and le politique in French (at least in parentheses) in
future translations of Rancière’s work.
76. Rancière (n. 10), p. 2.
77. Deranty’s attentiveness to the difference between le politique and la politique shows that
the mediation between la police and la politique is, contra May, not one that would be
transcended or sublated by a third term. Deranty himself holds to this line, saying that
the ‘mediation’ provided by le politique ‘must not be thought as a synthesis, since the
logic of the tort [the logic of the ‘‘wrong’’ that makes for dissensus] is decidedly non-
dialectical’ (Deranty (n. 48), p. 144). Deranty’s argument thereby exposes the weakness
in May’s reading; it does so by unravelling the very questions that May’s turn to nor-
mative grounds and substantive equality were meant to answer. Moreover, by shifting
Deranty’s observation of the difference between la politique and le politique from the
introduction of a third term to the doubling of one of the two main terms, my reading
insists on the paradoxical logic of Rancière’s work just as it maintains the impurity of
his account of politics. It also supports Deranty’s own emphasis on the non-dialectical
nature of Rancière’s thought. Split from itself (containing the traces of both la politique
and le politique within it), politics could never be pure. Part of my point here is to argue
both with and against Deranty. I agree that to render Rancière’s terms in dialectical
fashion is to miscontrue them badly, but I think we best avoid this false construal by
going further to avoid the hypostatization of ‘three terms’ in Rancière. This gets at a
more general point: it always proves very hard to avoid dialectics simply by claiming a
position as non-dialectical. This is the case since any opposition to dialectics runs the
risk of being captured precisely by dialectical logic, of turning that ‘opposition’ into
the negative moment on the way to dialectical synthesis. Thus, my goal here with
respect to Deranty’s interpretation of Rancière centres on making a more concerted

effort to avoid a dialectical rendering of Rancière’s thought. In this vein, Deleuze’s
project to articulate a non-dialectical opposition in Nietzsche proves exemplary, and,
of course, in many ways the entire Derridean project devotes itself to a thinking of
non-dialectical difference, i.e. differance. Gilles Deleuze (1983) [1962] Nietzsche and
Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Jacques Derrida (1982) Margins
of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
78. Rancière (n. 10), p. 2.
79. Ibid. p. 5: emphasis added.
80. On impure politics, see Kaplan’s notion of ‘impure democracy’ in the work of Paul
Ricoeur: David Kaplan (2008) Reading Ricoeur, p. 207. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
81. Rancière (n. 10), p. 7.
82. Thomson (n. 8), p. 6.
83. Jacques Rancière (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jacques Rancière (1994) The
Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
84. In the afterword to the English translation of The Philosopher and his Poor Rancière
refers to his own ‘theory of politics’. To my knowledge, this is the only place Rancière
uses such language in a positive sense, though even here he complicates it significantly,
saying that it ‘moved considerably away from what is generally understood by that
name’ (Rancière (n. 34), p. 225).
85. Rancière (n. 32), p. 114.
86. It is also why, again working against May’s project, the moment a putatively demo-
cratic project becomes purely self-referential – concerned only with those who struggle
and not with the struggle itself – is the moment that it is no longer ‘political’ in
Rancière’s sense (see Thomson (n. 8), p. 17).
87. Rancière (n. 10), p. 14.
88. Rancière (1995, in n. 43), p. 70.
89. Deranty (n. 47), para. 30.
90. Rancière (n. 83), p. 78.

Rancière y La Política Pura

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Rancière y La Política Pura

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Article EJPT

European Journal of Political Theory

proceduralism and Habermasian deliberative democracy, while refusing to repeat

In his eﬀort to appropriate Rancière’s thinking in the service of anarchist politics

The only practical diﬃculty [with Aristotle’s otherwise ‘limpid demonstration’] is in

Politics and the political: the ‘three term’ model

arguments;48 instead, I wish to focus on a particular set of claims he makes within

Nevertheless, in terms of my own argument, Marchart’s key quote on Rancière

If le politique imposes itself as an object of philosophical thought, it is without doubt

The doubling of politics: democratic politics within the

the word itself is a doubling of double, connecting directly to my broader argument

impurity of politics is a commitment to another task, a reraising of the question

1. Jacques Rancière (1999) [1995] Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis:

McClure (2003) ‘Disconnections, connections, and questions: Reﬂections on Jacques

Jacques Rancière (2003) ‘The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and aesthetics’, p. 2,

Rancière. Deranty’s work, in particular, provides crucial insights to Rancière’s broader

72. Rancière (n. 41), p. 61.

respect to Deranty’s interpretation of Rancière centres on making a more concerted

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen