Reading Jacques Ranciere's 'Ten Theses on Politics': After September 11th

With September 11th, we are told, everything changed. This refrain has acquired the numbing force of a cliché in the months since the attack on the World Trade Center. America will never be the same again; irony has become unsustainable; patriotism is in. Responses from the left of a positivist sort — such as in Noam Chomsky’s early remarks that circulated on the internet, the clichéd claim is rejected tout court as cliché. For Chomsky, the only remarkable thing about the devastation is that it occurred on U.S. soil. Yet, as with all clichés, this one too contains a moment of truth: the events of Sept. 11th indeed mark a new configuration in political terms, and the aftermath of the attack — the war in Afghanistan and the global maneuvering that has accompanied it — this aftermath itself marks a new arrangement in global relations, in the articulations of the global with the local, and in the disciplining of the so-called rogue states, social movements and social formations. I shall use Jacques Rancière’s “Ten theses on Politics” as an occasion to offer a few suggestions for thinking about certain aspects of the politics of September 11th and its aftermath, and for altering our thinking about politics in order to respond adequately to the events and the suffering they have evoked and brought forth.

“Why Do They Hate Us So Much?”

Rancière’s “Ten Theses” calls for a rethinking of the nature and meaning of politics by continually re-constellating a key set of concepts: politics, democracy, the people, the police. The overall aim appears to be to rescue the figures of political struggle from their repeated normalization in political philosophy and to insist on the inherent precariousness and, above all, rarity of the political. To use this text as an occasion for thinking about the politics of September 11th is, I am aware, to bring this text into contexts that are, in a narrow sense at least, not properly its own. But to the extent that Rancière’s text is concerned with exploring the conditions for dignity and democracy in the organization of social and political life, beyond the implementation of borders and boundaries by the modes of governance he calls the “police,” it may be seen as implicitly calling for such a move itself. Rancière’s text is in fact highly suggestive of certain directions we may take in thinking about the political crisis of our present moment.

Following a long tradition in political theory, and drawing ultimately, of course, on Aristotle, Rancière notes that in politics the one who performs an action and the one upon whom an action is performed, are one and the same being. Politics for him disrupts the logic of determinate superiority and inferiority upon which all traditional qualifications for ruling or governing are based. But, unlike those political theorists for whom this subject-object of political action emerges in the revolutionary declaration of the rights of the citizen,^[1] in Rancière’s formulation, the “two-fold body of the people is not a modern consequence of the sacrifice of the sovereign body but rather a given constitutive of politics.” Democracy is thus for Rancière, in a fundamental sense, “the regime of politics” (emphasis added), rather than one of its possible forms of manifestation. Democracy: the rule of the demos, of those who have no specificity in common, none of the traditional qualifications for governing, based on difference of birth, such as embodied in the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over slaves, and nobles over serfs.^[2] The demos, he tells us, is “the category of peoples who do not count,” “the one[s] who [have] no speech to be heard.” Thus what Rancière means to accomplish in “Ten Theses” is to begin the difficult task of distinguishing democracy-politics from the forms of rule in which it is negated.

One of the most frequent responses in the public sphere to the attack of September 11 has taken the form of a question...