Disconnections, Connections, and Questions: Reflections on Jacques Rancière's "Ten Theses on Politics"

Last year, when this symposium was first imagined, little seemed further away than the prospect of war. Little today, might seem further from the singularity of the past month than talk of the Greek demos, or of a political sensibility gathered through a critical engagement with its ancient philosophical detractors. To say this is to note what I take as a double dilemma besetting the arrival on these shores of Professor Rancière’s “10 Theses on Politics” — the first English translation of which is soon to be available on line in the electronic journal Theory and Event.

In the first place, there is the dilemma encountered by all translations that are not, as Walter Benjamin had it, merely a matter of conveying information. Political languages, I take it, are not simply a collection of concepts stated and defined in analytic terms. Akin to poetics in this respect, they often travel strangely from place to place because, even today, there remains something almost chthonic about them. There remains, in other words, something that ties their affective dimensions to the particularities of their living usages as a common vernacular, something that Rancière himself thematizes with the somatically inflected term “aisthesis” — that is, a feeling of justice and injustice that materializes within particular partitions of the sensible. This, I would suggest, is even more the case with regard to polemical writings, however widely dispersed their stipulated conceptual armature might be — as is the case now with such terms as democracy, equality, freedom, law, rights, civil society, and the like. This is the sort of thing that Hannah Arendt marked in her observation that, in the absence of a sensus communis — that tacit sense of what “goes without saying” in particular places — political argument tends to be captured by the demands of that other capacity common to creatures capable of language, the demands of logic.

This first dilemma, then, is no small one. But these days it is perhaps exacerbated by a second — that is, by “the events of Sept. 11” and their continuing implications. As I write this near the end of September, beyond the acts of terrorism that they surely were, those events have yet to receive a settled name, though two jostle together across the airwaves and in common conversation: “acts of war” and “crimes against humanity.” Though these last two have been ordinarily understood as mutually exclusive, it now appears that the conventional disparity between them has yielded to modes of acting that synthesize their martial and juridical fields into a common practice. On October 9th the front page of Le Monde characterized this practice, in scare quotes, as “le guerre humanitaire” — “humanitarian war” — a phrase that (to my knowledge) is no less new than it is strange.

Between these two dilemmas — that of translation and that of the event — this symposium is unavoidably suspended. At such a time, some might say, to speak of the Greek demos can only be an academic exercise, the murmurings of scholars and antiquarians. Tolerable in their proper place, of course. Even appropriate, as the usual hum of the academy. Academics in the U.S. are often told — and sometimes say ourselves — that the university is a place separate from “the real world.” And yet, even for those tempted to disparage it, it is a part of the normalcy to which many now wish to return.

And this, I think, is where our two dilemmas begin to merge. For at this moment, the difficulty of translating polemics across national and linguistic frontiers now meets the contingencies of an American context for which both “politics” and “polemics” have long been terms of disrepute in any case. But perhaps there’s an opportunity here as well. In the remarks that follow, I’d like to skirt these dilemmas by briefly noting a few lines of connection and disconnection that appear to me significant, in this time and this place, as a reader of the “10 Theses.”

I. Disconnections

First, some disconnections. Here, I would begin by noting something that, on first glance, might seem an incommensurable...