This article focuses on Jacques Rancière’s reflections on Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda Project in the context of wider discussions of the politics of naming the dead. Against the claim that his reflections reveal a depoliticizing, universalist commitment to naming all the dead, it contends that foregrounding the relation between naming and counting in this discussion shows Rancière’s focus to be the policing and politics of naming. In an original argument, it focuses specifically on how, for Rancière, in this context, individualized (...) proper names function politically and dissensually. To do so it explores Rancière’s analysis of the role of the mainstream media during the Rwandan genocide in perpetuating the police order which divided nameable individuals from anonymous masses, thereby constituting living and dead Rwandans as of little or no account, and his account of how Jaar’s art is able to disrupt the ‘partition of the sensible’ underpinning this count. The article concludes by considering how Rancière’s ideas about the relationship between naming and counting and between politics and police serve as a useful supplement to and extension of existing discussions of grievability. (shrink)

This article discusses the right to be forgotten. The landmark Google ruling of the European Court of Justice gave this ambiguous right new weight and raised several urgent questions. This article considers what kind of person is presupposed and constructed when somebody invokes their right to be forgotten. The aim is to engage in an experimental reading of the ruling in the framework of contemporary political theory, namely, the philosophy of Jacques Rancière. The analysis shows that even though the right (...) to be forgotten is a new legal and rhetorical instrument, there are good grounds for being critical of its underlying logic and sceptical of the novelty thereof. The judgment can be understood as a reiteration and consolidation of the same impotent human rights thinking that law often seems forced to contend itself with, no matter how radical our intentions may be. (shrink)

Several authors have recently stressed the constitutive and ubiquitous nature of representation, which, as a result, can no longer be conceived as a relation between pre-existing entities. This has important consequences for democratic representation, traditionally thought in terms of authorization, accountability or representativity. This article argues that Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy makes a fruitful contribution to the necessary rethinking of democratic representation. Although Rancière never systematically developed a theory of representation, this concept is shown to constitute a red thread throughout (...) his political writings. His main contribution consists in shifting the focus from the relation between representative and represented to the relation between the distribution of the sensible as a space of representability and its disruption or contestation. This makes it possible to recast a critique of representative government, and to reconceive of democratic representation, which is about making the contingent equality underlying each order visible. (shrink)

Gert Biesta criticises deliberative models of democracy and education for being based on an understanding of democracy as a ‘normal’ order, which involves certain ‘entry conditions’ for democratic participation. As an alternative, Biesta introduces the idea of democracy as ‘disruption’ and the associated subjectification conception of education both of which he draws from the work of Jacques Rancière. This paper challenges Biesta’s critique of deliberative democracy by demonstrating that the ‘entry conditions’ for deliberation serve an important normative function. It is (...) also suggested that Biesta’s critique dismisses some important dimensions of the deliberative model. The paper further contests Biesta’s conceptions of democracy and education by arguing, first, that his position involves certain contradictions that are problematic especially from a normative perspective. Second, the paper argues that Biesta’s conceptions of democracy and education might result in dismissing crucially important questions concerning the long-term evaluation and improvement of democratic and educational institutions. (shrink)

This article examines Rancière’s political reading of aesthetics through a historical analysis into the two aesthetic theories of freedom at work in Rancière’s philosophy; Kant’s freedom as self-governance and Schiller’s freedom as harmony. While aesthetic experience is considered morally conducive through its association with freedom, this article argues that Rancière translates such discussions of freedom into that of equality by extracting the political dimensions of aesthetic experience. Given that art has the unique ability to empower the spectator through its aesthetic (...) experience of equality, the true political potential of art arises from its power to redistribute the sensible rather than through the overt expression of political themes. By juxtaposing Rancière’s politics of art with Kant’s beauty as the symbol of morality, this article argues that art becomes a symbol of political emancipation for Rancière in its capacity to generate the experience of equality. Inasmuch as Rancière attributes the aesthetic revolution to the eighteenth century, it becomes evident that the empowerment of the spectator has been central to art since the inauguration of the aesthetic regime. (shrink)

Introduction: Foucault and political philosophy -- Marx: antinormative critique -- Lenin: the invention of party governmentality -- Althusser: the failure to denormativise Marxism -- Deleuze: denormativisation as norm -- Rorty: relativising normativity -- Honneth: the poverty of critical theory -- Geuss: the paradox of realism -- Foucault: the lure of neoliberalism -- Conclusion: What now?

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the (...) emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts. (shrink)

Recent theories of community aim to think the term beyond its definition as the ownership of shared identity, language, culture or territory. For Esposito, to reduce community to a property whose possession distinguishes members from non-members undermines the commonality the term implies. The common opposes what is proper or one’s own; it belongs to everyone and anyone. Rather than securing identity and belonging, community, defined by its impropriety, disrupts them so that we are in common. While his work successfully illustrates (...) the incompatibility of the common and the proper, it leaves unanswered the question of how communities come to experience their impropriety. Through a comparison with Rancière’s improper community, we can identify and gesture beyond this limit. Its members intervene in proper communities by exercising the right to decide on common matters despite officially having no right to do so. Their actions, by demonstrating the openness of the common to anyone and everyone, turn its privatisation into a shared wrong that connects community with non-community. By supplementing Esposito’s work with Rancière’s, we see how communities relate to what they have deemed improper in a way that both challenges and revitalises their sense of commonality. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière, we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of (...) police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section, we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized police order. (shrink)

The Repeal campaign articulated new and transformative relationships between law, reproduction and the political in Ireland. During the campaign, ordinary people took ownership of and participated in mutual teaching and critique of law on a wide scale. Art, along these lines, was often used to document and archive the injustices worked by the 8th Amendment. However, art also became a means of imagining law otherwise. In this piece, I use Jacques Rancière’s work on the relationship between aesthetics and politics to (...) analyse artistic contributions to feminist legal discourses associated with Repeal. (shrink)

In this essay we explore Rancière’s ‘politics of equals’ as an alternative conception of the political. Central to this conception is a division between instances of political contestation that address fundamental questions of equality (‘the politics of equals’) and those that are part of the management of the division of resources and positions in society (‘the police’). This distinction provides a new way of thinking about theoretical and empirical questions over logics of political action.

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. These make being wealthy very pleasant indeed, but they are also toxic to democracy. First, I analyse the mechanisms by which the presence of very wealthy individuals undermines the two pillars of liberal democracy, equality of citizenship and legitimate social choice. Second, I make a radical proposal. If we value the preservation of democracy we must limit the amount of wealth any individual can have and still be a (...) citizen of our polity. (shrink)

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The (...) Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

Increased attention to the relationship between democracy and education in the UK has been accompanied over the past thirteen years by an interest in how art can be used to promote democratic citizenship.While this approach has led to increased funding for the arts, it is not without its problems,and has often entailed an apolitical and instrumentalist view of both art and education. This paper turns to the political philosophy of Mouffe and Rancière, the work of Rancière in aesthetics, and Biesta’s (...) educational philosophy to develop an alternative way of understanding the significance of art for democracy and education. Building on their work, I take a performative and collective view of democratic subjectivity as the basis on which to construct this alternative understanding. I further argue that this conceptualisation can aid our understanding of democratic learning and our ability to provide opportunities for it through art and educational practice. (shrink)

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition (...) of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act. (shrink)

This paper returns to some themes found in David Mitrany's classical ‘functionalist’ approach to international politics, in order to reconstruct practical principles that might be applied to contemporary politics as well as debates in International Relations and international political theory. It attempts to do this through two moves — ‘restoration’ and ‘contemporary reconstruction’. In restoring some of the insights Mitrany provides us that have been somewhat obscured over time, the paper hopes to demonstrate the ‘function’ behind functionalism — that its (...) core assumptions as an approach (if not ‘theory’) to international politics can prove to be just as instructive today as they were during the several decades of their initial development by Mitrany. Reconstruction, however, is necessitated by the observation that some of Mitrany's aspirations for functional theory — namely that it would produce ‘bonds’ that not only transcend national communities, but provide for the unraveling of the nation-state system as we know it — were a bit utopian. Thus, the paper proposes several avenues to reconstruct classical functionalism for contemporary politics. The paper then discusses three small empirical illustrations where micro-political insights can be extracted and briefly analysed: peace camps, the Regional Cooperation Council of the former Yugoslavia, and a more detailed analysis of the so-called ‘surge’ strategy in the ongoing US-Iraq conflict. It concludes with a two-pronged discussion on how micro-politics might speak to current debates in international political theory, and some mechanisms for securing functional spaces. (shrink)

In current discussions on contemporary political philosophy some commonplaces around Rancière’s thought are restated with the effect of neutralizing the potential of his reflections. I refer in particular to the following assumptions: a dichotomic understanding of Rancière’s distinction between politics and the police, an ontological interpretation of this difference, an identification of Rancière’s political propositions as anti-institutionalist; a reading of the practices of emancipation as something ephemeral without a durable effect for the common world. In this article I question these (...) assumptions by emphasizing some usually neglected aspects of Rancière’s arguments. (shrink)

Early intervention comes in-between the lives of children, families and teachers. This article uses part of a report written by an educational psychologist about a little girl to question the nature of intervention through Rancière’s writings. As children and parents are seen as put into the position of inadequacy, they require such intervention, which in turn makes them more inadequate. The article goes on to highlight the numerous ‘givings’ involved in early intervention, through Derrida’s writing. However, such giving is questioned (...) as creating expectations that receivers of the gift must fulfil, thus nullifying the gift. The conclusion suggests that starting from a perspective of equality and acknowledging the aporia involved could help the people in this scenario to take a different approach. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)