2 READING RANCIÈRE returning to the definition of an anthropological disposition to political life, to the idea that politics is based on the human capacity of speaking and discussing, as Aristotle opposed it to the merely animal capacity of the voice which expresses pleasure and pain. On the contrary, I show that this ‘common’capacity is split up from the very beginning. Aristotle tells us that slaves understand language but don’t possess it. This is what dissensus means. There is politics because speaking is not the same as speaking, because there is not even an agreement on what a sense means. Political dissensus is not a discussion between speaking people who would confront their interests and values. It is a conflict about who speaks and who does not speak, about what has to be heard as the voice of pain and what has to be heard as an argument on justice. And this is also what ‘class war’means: not the conflict between groups which have opposite economic interests, but the conflict about what an ‘interest’is, the struggle between those who set themselves as able to manage social interests and those who are supposed to be only able to reproduce their life. I started from philosophers who defined politics as the implementation of a human disposition to the community because I wanted to show that it is impossible to draw such a deduction, that this ‘common’sensory quality is already the stage of a dissensus. This leads me to a methodological remark: disagreement is not only an object of my theorization. It is also its method. Addressing an author or a concept first means to me setting the stage for a disagreement, testing an operator of difference. This also means that my theoretical operations are always aimed at reframing the configuration of a problem. The same critics that suspect me of ‘returning’to the classics think that the distinction between politics and police in Disagreement or in the ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ amounts to a search for the purity of politics. Marxists see it as a reminder of the old ‘populist’opposition of spontaneity to organization, deconstructionists as an uncritical return to an old metaphysics of identity. But both miss the polemical context of my argumentation. My analysis of what ‘politics’ means was entirely aimed at challenging and overturning a given idea of that purity. It was a response to the so-called return of the political or return to politics which nearly overwhelmed us in the 1980s in France. At that time we could hear everywhere this motto: we have now broken away from the subjection of the political to the social, to social interests, social conflicts and social utopias. We have thus returned to the true sense of politics as the action on the public stage, the manifestation of a ‘being-together’, the search for the