Introduction: On the Edges of Jacques Ranciere

After the generation of Michel Serres, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu, a few French intellectuals, over the last ten or even twenty years, have developed original approaches to various objects of analysis (from aesthetics and literature to politics and science): Alain Badiou, Vincent Descombes, François Jullien, Jean-Luc Nancy, for example. Among them, Jacques Rancière occupies a remote position.

Coming from an Althusserian position, after years of archival work on nineteenth-century workers' writings, Jacques Rancière began to wander between social history and the poetics of historiography, between politics and aesthetics, between poetry and news, between cinema and social scenography, between great names like Plato, Aristotle, or Friedrich Schiller, and unknown thinkers like Joseph Jaccotot or Gabriel Gauny.¹ For Rancière, one very fundamental motto is to take seriously, as equally intelligent, university professors and humble shoemakers. "Equally intelligent"—both terms are important: they lead the reflection towards the status of political equality, and the legitimacy of ordinary people appearing as intelligent. There should be a presumption of intelligence, just as we have conceived, as a right, a presumption of innocence. Unlike all the fearful pessimists who are anxious to keep everyone in his or her place in the city (artisans in their shops, and philosophers or the elite on the agora), and unlike all the happy pessimists who deconstruct and demystify subjective blindness, teaching poor people what they cannot know about themselves, Jacques Rancière is a confident critic: he simply assumes that everyone can think. It is true that people are denied the legitimacy to think (and they can internalize such a denial), but such a wrong must become a matter of litigation. The original wrong consists in hearing "noises" instead of voices, something "roaring" in place of someone speaking. This is where politics emerges.

Jacques Rancière, in a very original move, tries to disentangle politics from the conquest or exercise of power. What he calls "police" is the management of human passions and the building of types of society and modes of life: it produces consensus. Politics is a dissensual form of human action, the way by which some people try to be heard even if (actually, precisely because) they have no legitimacy for speaking. Police is in charge of the social configuration of what is called the "partage du sensible": the French partage can have two almost opposite meanings, the first is "to share, to have in common," the second, "to divide, to share out." The affirmation of something in common is at the same time the repartition of authorized positions. Configuring consensus implies also figuring social perspectives (hierarchies). Police, as power practices and social life styles, builds inequalities, but such a construction has to appear natural. Politics is a precarious momentum, when a few illegitimate people affirm their fundamental equality with others.

Originally, this is the very figure of the démos, since for Aristotle there are three titles for being part of the city: the wealth of the oligoï, the excellence or the virtue of the aristoï, and the freedom of the démos (Politics III, 1281, b 36). But such a division is shaky since freedom, which is supposed to belong specifically to the démos, is obviously what is also shared by the few rich persons or by the few virtuous ones. The démos is at the same time included in the community and excluded from any specificity. This is what Jacques Rancière calls "la part des sans-part" [the portion of the portionless]. They are considered the equals of the oligoï and the aristoï, and thus they must have their share, but at the same time they are not recognized for what they are: they have to make their claim for true equality. Equality is characterized not by universal unification (everything is equal to everything else), but by a way of unlinking "natural" orders via the polemical figures...