On the Shores of Politics (review)

The very existence of this new edition of Jacques Rancière's On the Shores of Politics, originally published in French in 1992 and then translated by Liz Heron for Verso in 1995, is a remarkable fact that requires some critical attention. First of all, it bears witness to the increasing interest in Jacques Rancière's work in the Anglophone world during the first years of the twenty-first century. Now an Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Paris-VIII, Rancière has been a regular visitor of American universities since the 1990s, when the bulk of his earlier work from the 70s and 80s was translated into English. Now, most of Rancière's works are translated very quickly after their French publication. This is remarkable, because while the philosophical content of these works is eminently translatable and relevant in any national context, there nonetheless remains a certain French specificity to Rancière's writing, whose reception therefore does remain slightly ambiguous, mid-way between philosophy and French studies.

The first two essays featured in On the Shores of Politics are especially exemplary of the double nature of Rancière's argumentation: one punctual, almost a commentary to contemporary French events and debates, and the other timeless, firmly entrenched in the international tradition of political philosophy. "The End of Politics and the Realist Utopia" dates from May 1988, and was written in wake of the reelection of François Mitterrand to his second term as President against Jacques Chirac. Today, hearing Rancière defining Chirac as the "youthful candidate" who lost his presidential bid to the power of auctoritas incarnated by François Mitterrand, we do feel a strong sense of temporal disconnect: a seventy-year-old Chirac has now just completed his second presidential mandate, displaced by the young and dynamic Sarkozy. Perhaps more ironically, Jean-Marie Le Pen—featured in the essay as the reactionary contender whose strong showings in 1988 revealed that democracy always encounters its greatest challenge in the persistent threat of an exclusionary populace wanting to become One at the expense of a hated Other—was in fact to be instrumental to the election of Chirac in 1995, when he was his only opponent in the final electoral round. An additional complication is added by the fact that the three contenders are never mentioned by name, so in order to understand Rancière's essay, a small but real awareness of French politics is in fact required. Still, as always with Rancière, the rewards of this temporal and cultural leap far exceed its inconveniences: Rancière's argument about the fallacy of the liberal dream of a society of consensus where individual freedoms and moral tolerance would render any political conflict obsolete has lost none of its timeliness. Through a rather somber evocation of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents , Rancière argues that maybe other forms of political conflict—mainly the social dispute between rich and poor that played itself out in modernity under the Marxist category of class struggle—are only the already tamed version of a bigger and much more violent tendency: the desire, in each community, to be One, to be the absolute from which all others will be excluded in a fearful and aggressive refusal to ever become Two. According to Rancière, this is a risk that no multicultural rhetoric should let us forget.

The second essay in the book, "The Uses of Democracy," also proceeds from an event tied to the French political scene: the 1986 massive student protests against the so-called "loi Vaquet," a piece of legislation aimed at making French secondary education more responsive to economical realities in order to reduce the unemployment rate for university graduates. Rancière takes this ultra French example of top-down legislation challenged and ultimately halted by massive opposition in the street to develop one of his main philosophical arguments about the nature of democracy. With examples taken both from the Greek polis and...