Diacritics

Davide Panagia
Jacques Ranciére
Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière
Diacritics - Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2000, pp. 113-126

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Jacques Ranciere and Davide Panagia - Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Ranciere - diacritics 30:2 diacritics 30.2 (2000) 113-126 Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière 1 Davide Panagia: In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an "excess of words" that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of "the part of those who have no-part" as voicing a "wrong" for the sake of equality. In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the "linguistic turn" in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such. Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics? Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a "poetics of politics"? Rancière's Reply: In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of "linguistic turn" you invoke....