The Differences Between Ranciere's Mesentente (Political Disagreement) and Lyotard's Differend

Rancière's La Mésentente (1995), which conflicts with both classical (Plato, Aristotle) and modern (Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, etc.) political philosophy, in the name of politics as action, in the name of the "sans part"— those still in a provisional public invisibility - underlines from the start its opposition toLyotard's Le Différend.

Lyotard (1924-1998) was sixteen years older than Rancière; both taught philosophy at the experimental center established in fall 1968 in Vincennes after the events of the previous May. Both also subsequently taught at l'Université de Paris-8. For all philosophers who chose to teach and engage in activism at Vincennes, the recruitment was, according to F. Chatelet, politico-philosophical. Each non-Communist Marxist group sent their representatives: the Althusser-Maoists from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d'Ulm, sent Badiou and Rancière; the Trotskyists sentBensaïd, Weber, and Brossat, the libertarians surrounding Schérer and Hocquenghem. This avant-garde was to bejoined by Deleuze and Lyotard. Lyotard, who had belonged to the group "Socialisme et Barbarie" founded by Lefort and Castoriadis, was welcomed somewhat later, with a certain apprehension. As Rancière recalled at Lyotard's funeral, one knew that with him things would not be easy. In fact, the way people behaved was not necessarily academic in this experimental university center instituted by the Gaullist government in order to create a kind of focal abscess for everything radical in the French university system. It was not unusual for Maoist Cultural Revolution commandos to be looking for a fight and for philosophical arguments to be hurled at Lyotard, especially once he "betrayed the dictates of the proletariat" by developing the analyses of L'économie libidinale.

The "virility" of these exchanges did not later prevent an important epistolary discussion from developing between Lyotard and Badiou, during the preparation of Lyotard's great philosophical text, Le Différend. It is to be hoped that someday this correspondence will be published, for it raises such questions as "is mathematics the key to ontology?"

Rancière and Lyotard were struggling on the same ground— that of the articulation between aesthetics and politics. Rancière developed a genuine archival approach to working-class literary imagination in the nineteenth century (La nuit des prolétaires, 1981, Lephilosophe et ses pauvres, 1983, etc.). Lyotard worked on the figural, this true historical thrust of the unconscious, which for example triggers the subversive figures of carnival. The figural is the urge to undo each era of the aesthetical-political surface of inscription.

I propose to analyze here their two approaches to aesthetics, which refers not to the science of works of art but to the question of aisthesis, from two different methodological angles — via language and certain intralingusitic conflicts that go beyond this field, and via the characterization of our era.

In La mésentente, Rancière distinguishes explicitly between a situation of misunderstanding and a situation of différend. He argues that misunderstanding cannot arise from the Lyotardian problematic of the différend between genres of discourse or the différend between modes of phrase. A situation of misunderstanding supposes two speakers who either use the same words but in different senses, or with the same word do not designate the same thing as referent. But the most radical misunderstanding is the one that divides two speakers—when the first cannot understand the second because, according to him, words do not belong to articulated language, to logos, but rather to an inarticulate voice, to phôné. That voice, which, according to Aristotle (in Politics), humans have in common with animals, can only express feelings, pleasure or pain, in the form of a cry, contentment or hate, and by cheers or booing in the case of a group. If some people cannot consider others as speakers, it is simply...