Abstract

This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be “theorists of the event” and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this categorization by highlighting significant differences between these two theorists’ seemingly similar accounts. My argument is that Rancière and Negri have developed their radically different conceptions of democratic action in response to two political questions, which first confronted them in the aftermath of May 1968: What is the role of intellectuals in emancipatory struggles? And who is the subject of revolutionary politics?

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