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"This timely collection of essays should finally jump-start the English-speaking conversation about the work of Jacques Ranciere, one of the most innovative political philosophers now writing. His method of equality, his contrast of a stable 'police' order with 'the political' as an interruption of that order by those invisible within it, and his idea that both politics and art involve modes of distributing/partitioning the sensible together form a unique constellation of radical political thinking."--J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

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JACQUES RANCIRE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction / Jacques Rancire: Thinker of Dissensus GABRIEL ROCKHILL and PHILIP WATTS........................................11. Historicizing Untimeliness KRISTIN ROSS....................................................................................152. The Lessons of Jacques Rancire: Knowledge and Power after the Storm ALAIN BADIOU..........................................303. Sophisticated Continuities and Historical Discontinuities, Or, Why Not Protagoras? ERIC MCHOULAN..........................554. The Classics and Critical Theory in Postmodern France: The Case of Jacques Rancire GIUSEPPINA MECCHIA.....................675. Rancire and Metaphysics JEAN-LUC NANCY....................................................................................836. What Is Political Philosophy? Contextual Notes TIENNE BALIBAR.............................................................957. Rancire in South Carolina TODD MAY........................................................................................1058. Political Agency and the Ambivalence of the Sensible YVES CITTON...........................................................1209. Staging Equality: Rancire's Theatrocracy and the Limits of Anarchic Equality PETER HALLWARD...............................14010. Rancire's Leftism, Or, Politics and Its Discontents BRUNO BOSTEELS........................................................15811. Jacques Rancire's Ethical Turn and the Thinking of Discontents SOLANGE GUNOUN............................................17612. The Politics of Aesthetics: Political History and the Hermeneutics of Art GABRIEL ROCKHILL.................................19513. Cinema and Its Discontents TOM CONLEY......................................................................................21614. Politicizing Art in Rancire and Deleuze: The Case of Postcolonial Literature RAJI VALLURY.................................22915. Impossible Speech Acts: Jacques Rancire's Erich Auerbach ANDREW PARKER....................................................24916. Style indirect libre JAMES SWENSON.........................................................................................258Afterword / The Method of Equality: An Answer to Some Questions JACQUES RANCIRE...............................................273Notes...........................................................................................................................289Bibliography....................................................................................................................327Index...........................................................................................................................341Contributors and Translators....................................................................................................355

Chapter One

In an essay written shortly after the American war in Iraq began, Jacques Rancire wrote about the seamless integration of capital, state, military, and media power achieved in the United States during the months preceding the invasion. He called the fusion "a perfecting of the plutocratic system." Certainly, those of us who lived through those months in the United States (or-again-the months preceding the 2004 presidential election) can testify to the background noise we heard. It wasn't bombs-these we saw and heard very little of-but rather the media's relentless litany of repeated phrases: "weapons of mass destruction," "Afghani women voting," "evil dictator," and one or two others. But I want to begin by evoking an earlier moment in the history of that seamless integration: the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan set up a covert CIA operation bearing a name I think Rancire might appreciate: "Perception Management." Perception Management, unlike other CIA operations, was directed domestically and was, for all intents and purposes, the now-forgotten origin of the media techniques later to be perfected by the George W. Bush administration. Reagan wanted to swing public opinion to support his Central American policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and to that end polling was conducted to determine which precise buzzwords and concepts would best turn U.S. citizens against the Sandanistas and get them to support the Contras and the Salvadoran government. In the face of the latest great "third-worldist" cause, the solidarity movements with the peoples of Nicaragua and El Salvador, the idea was to saturate the media with phrases repeated over and over like mantras: the Sandanistas are anti-Semitic, they're drug runners, they discriminate against indigenous peoples, they're terrorists, and so forth-to enormous effect. It is during these years, I think-the early 1980s-that consensus first comes to be taken for granted as the optimum political gesture or goal, with "Perception Management" its more than adequate figure. And it was around this time that I first began to read Rancire's work. Against this ideological backdrop, the untimeliness of his project was strongly perceptible. This is why I'll not focus on Dis-agreement and the recent intellectual developments which, as conferences held in the United Kingdom, Berlin, Cisy, and elsewhere suggest, are now placing Rancire's work at the center of contemporary discussions. I want to go back, rather, to the earlier stages of the project: to Jacotot and The Names of History. For it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that a generalized offensive against equality, under the cover of a critique of egalitarianism, began to make of equality a synonym for uniformity, for the constraint or alienation of liberty, or for an assault on the free functioning of the market. It is in this context that Rancire's preoccupation with, or recurrent staging of, equality and its verification could be called untimely, or that my own experience reading a book like The Ignorant Schoolmaster could be one of delighted shock-only initially really graspable for me, teaching in central California, as a kind of echo of certain Latin American utopian pedagogical experiments of the 1960s. So although the introduction I wrote to my translation of The Ignorant Schoolmaster created a kind of context for the book out of the French educational policies and debates of the first period of Mitterrand, my own enthusiasm, what made me want to do the translation, was the way Rancire's book seemed to me to resonate, however slightly, with earlier interventions like Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society or Paolo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Now France, of course, like Germany, had no Reagan or Thatcher, which is to say no full-scale ultraconservative restructuring of its economy in the 1980s. Then, as now, a difference can be detected between governments where systems of social protection and solidarity have not been completely dismantled and those, like the United States, where they have. But the 1980s in France were nevertheless what Serge Halimi might call an intensely philo-American time, as France began to accommodate itself to the ascendancy of an American liberal orthodoxy, an orthodoxy in which equality came to be seen as a body of principles which, at best, can be interpreted by a court rather than what Rancire's work insisted on showing it to be: a profoundly political...